AMERICAN NOTES 



BY 

RUDYARD KIPLING 



New York 
FRANK F. LOVELL COMPANY 

23 Duane Street 









BY TBANSFEH 
JUN 5 IW 



/ 



fts 



YX 



NOTE. 



The following letters were written by Mr. 
Kipling in 1889, while on a trip from India 
to England by way of the United States. 

They were published as special correspond- 
ence in the Pio?ieer of India at the time. 

The Publishers. 



AMERICAN NOTES. 



i. 

" Then spoke der Captain Stossenheim 
Who had theories of God, 
4 Oh, Breitmann, this is judgment on 
Der ways dot you have trod. 
You only lifs to enjoy yourself 
While you yourself agree 
Dot self-development requires 
Der religious Idee.' " 

This is America. 

They call her the City of Peking, and she 
belongs to the Pacific Mail Company, but for 
all practical purposes she is the United States. 

We are divided between missionaries and 
generals — generals who were at Vicksburg 
and Shiloh, and German by birth, but more 
American than the Americans, who in confi- 
dence tell you that they are not generals at 
all, but only brevet majors of militia corps. 
The missionaries are perhaps the queerest 
portion of the cargo. Did you ever hear an 
English minister lecture for half an hour on 
the freight-traffic receipts and general working 
7 



8 American Notes. 

of, let us say, the Midland ? The Professor 
has been sitting at the feet of a keen-eyed, 
olose-bearded, swarthy man who expounded 
unto him kindred mysteries with a fluency 
and precision that a city leader-writer might 
have envied. " Who's your financial friend 
with the figures at his fingers' ends ? " I 
asked. " Missionary — Presbyterian Mission 
to the Japs," said the Professor. I laid my 
hand upon my mouth and was dumb. 

As a counterpoise to the missionaries, we 
carry men from Manila — lean Scotchmen who 
gamble once a month in the Manila State 
lottery and occasionally turn up trumps. One, 
at least, drew r a ten-thousand-dollar prize last 
December and is away to make merry in the 
New World. Everybody on the staff of an 
American steamer this side the Continent 
seems to gamble steadily in that lottery, and 
the talk of the smoking-room runs almost 
entirely on prizes won by accident or lost 
through a moment's delay. The tickets are 
sold more or less openly at Yokohama 
and Hong-Kong, and the drawings — losers 
and winners both agree here — are above re- 
proach. 

We have resigned ourselves to the infinite 
monotony of a twenty days' voyage. The 
Pacific Mail advertises falsely. Only under 
the most favorable circumstances of wind and 
steam can their under-engined boats cover 
the distance in fifteen days. Our City of 



American Notes. 9 

Peking, for instance, had been jogging along 
at a gentle ten knots an hour, a pace out of 
all proportion to her bulk. " When we get a 
wind," says the Captain, "we shall do better." 
She is a four-master and can carry any 
amount of canvas. It is not safe to run 
steamers across this void under the poles of 
Atlantic liners. The monotony of the sea is 
paralyzing. We have passed the wreck of a 
little sealing-schooner lying bottom up and 
covered with gulls. She weltered by in the 
chill dawn, unlovely as the corpse of a man ; 
and the wild birds piped thinly at us as they 
steered her across the surges. The pulse of 
the Pacific is no little thing even in the quieter 
moods of the sea. It set our bows swinging 
and nosing and ducking ere we were a day 
clear of Yokohama, and yet there was never 
swell nor crested wave in sight. " We ride 
very high," said the Captain, " and she's a 
dry boat. She has a knack of crawling over 
things somehow ; but we shan't need to put 
her to the test this journey." 



The Captain was mistaken. For four days 
we have endured the sullen displeasure of the 
North Pacific, winding up with a night of dis- 
comfort. It began with a gray sea, flying 
clouds, and a head-wind that smote fifty knots 
off the day's run. Then rose from the south- 
east a beam sea warranted by no wind that 



io American Notes. 

was abroad upon the waters in our neighbor- 
hood, and we wallowed in the trough of it for 
sixteen mortal hours. In the stillness of the 
harbor, when the newspaper man is lunching 
in her saloon and the steam-launch is crawling 
round her sides, a ship of pride is a " stately 
liner." Out in the open, one rugged shoulder 
of a sea between you and the horizon, she be- 
comes " the old hooker," a " lively boat," and 
other things of small import, for this is nec- 
essary to propitiate the Ocean. " There's 
a storm to the southeast of us," explained 
the Captain. " That's what's kicking up this 
sea." 

The City of Peking did not belie her repu- 
tation. She crawled over the seas in liveliest 
wise, never shipping a bucket till — she was 
forced to. Then she took it green over the 
bows to the vast edification of, at least, one 
passenger who had never seen the scuppers 
full before. 

Later in the day the fun began. " Oh, 
she's a daisy at rolling," murmured the chief 
steward, flung starfish-wise on a table among 
his glassware. " She's rolling some," said a 
black apparition new risen from the stoke- 
hold. " Is she going to roll any more ? " de- 
manded the ladies grouped in what ought to 
have been the ladies' saloon, but, according to 
American custom, was labeled " Social Hall." 

Passed in the twilight the chief officer — a 
dripping, bearded face. " Shall I mark out 



American Notes. n 

the bull-board ? " said he, and lurched aft, 
followed by the tongue of a wave. " She'll 
roll her guards under to-night," said a man 
from Louisiana, where their river-steamers do 
not understand the meaning of bulwarks. 
We dined to a dashing accompaniment of 
crockery, the bounds of emancipated beer- 
bottles livelier than their own corks, and the 
clamor of the ship's gong broken loose and 
calling to meals on its own account. 

After dinner the real rolling began. She 
did roll " guards under," as the Louisiana 
man had prophesied. At thirty-minute inter- 
vals to the second arrived one big sea, when 
the electric lamps died down to nothing, and 
the screw raved and the blows of the sea made 
the decks quiver. On those occasions we 
moved from our chairs, not gently, but dis- 
courteously. At other times we were merely 
holding on with both hands. 

It was then that I studied Fear — Terror 
bound in black silk and fighting hard with 
herself. For reasons which will be thoroughly 
understood, there was a tendency among the 
passengers to herd together and to address in- 
quiries to every officer who happened to stagger 
through the saloon. No one was in the least 
alarmed, — oh dear, no, — but all were keenly 
anxious for information. This anxiety re- 
doubled after a more than usually vicious roll. 
Terror was a large, handsome, and cultured 
lady who knew the precise value of human 



12 American Notes. 

life, the inwardness of Robert Elsmere, the 
latest poetry — everything in fact that a clever 
woman should know. When the rolling was 
near its worst, she began to talk swiftly. I do 
not for a moment believe that she knew what 
she was talking about. The rolling increased. 
She buckled down to the task of making con- 
versation. By the heave of the laboring 
bust, the restless working of the fingers on the 
tablecloth, and the uncontrollable eyes that 
turned always to the companion stairhead, I 
was able to judge the extremity of her fear. 
Yet her words were frivolous and common- 
place enough ; they poured forth unceasingly, 
punctuated with little laughs and giggles, as a 
woman's speech should be. Presently, a mem- 
ber of her group suggested going to bed. 
No, she wanted to sit up ; she wanted to go 
on talking, and as long as she could get a soul 
to sit with her she had her desire. When for 
sheer lack of company she was forced to get 
to her cabin, she left reluctantly, looking 
back to the well-lighted saloon over her 
shoulder. The contrast between the flowing 
triviality of her speech and the strained in- 
tentness of eye and hand was a quaint thing 
to behold. I know now how Fear should be 
painted. 

No one slept very heavily that night. Both 
arms were needed to grip the berth, while the 
trunks below wound the carpet slips into knots 
and battered the framing of the cabins. Once 



American Notes. 13 

it seemed to me that the whole of the laboring 
fabric that cased our trumpery fortunes stood 
on end and in this undignified posture hopped 
a mighty hop. Twice I know I shot out of my 
berth to join the adventurous trunks on the 
floor. A hundred times the crash of the wave 
on the ship's side was followed by the roar of 
the water, as it swept the decks and raved 
round the deckhouses. In a lull I heard the 
flying feet of a man, a shout, and a far-away 
chorus of lost spirits singing somebody's 
requiem. 

May 24 (Queen's Birthday). — If ever you 
meet an American, be good to him. This 
day the ship was dressed with flags from stem 
to stern, and chiefest of the bunting was the 
Union-Jack. They had given no word of 
warning to the English, who were proportion- 
ately pleased. At dinner up rose an ex-Com- 
missioner of the Lucknow Division (on my 
honor, Anglo-India extends to the ends of the 
earth !) and gave us the health of Her Majesty 
and the President. It was afterwards that the 
trouble began. A small American penned 
half a dozen English into a corner and lectured 
them soundly on — their want of patriotism ! 

" What sort of Queen's Birthday do you 
call this ? " he thundered. " What did you 
drink our President's health for ? What's the 
President to you on this day of all others ? 
Well, suppose you are in the minority, all the 
more reason for standing by your country. 



14 American Notes. 

Don't talk to me. You Britishers made a 
mess of it — a mighty bungle of the whole 
thing. I'm an American of the Americans ; 
but if no one can propose Her Majesty's 
health better than by just throwing it at your 
heads, I'm going to try." 

Then and there he delivered a remarkably 
neat little oration — pat, well put together, and 
clearly delivered. So it came to pass that the 
Queen's health was best honored by an Amer- 
ican. We English were dazed. I wondered 
how many Englishmen not trained to address- 
ing their fellows would have spoken half so 
fluently as the gentleman from 'Frisco. 

" Well, you see," said one of us feebly, 
" she's our Queen, anyhow, and — and — she's 
been ours for fifty years, and not one of us 
here has seen England for seven years, and 
we can't enthuse over the matter. We've lived 
to be hauled over the coals for want of patriot- 
ism by an American ! We'll be more careful 
next time." 

And the conversation drifted naturally into 
the question of the government of men — Eng- 
lish, Japanese (we have several traveled Jap- 
anese aboard), and Americans throwing the 
ball from one to another. We bore in mind 
the golden rule : " Never agree with a man 
who abuses his own country," and got on well 
enough. 

" Japan," said a little gentleman who was a 
rich man there, " Japan is divided into two 



American Notes. 15 

administrative sides. On the one the remains 
of a very strict and quite Oriental despotism ; 
on the other a mass of — what do you call it ? 
— red-tapeism which is not understood even 
by the officials who handle it. We copy the 
red tape, and when it is copied we believe 
that we administer. That is a vice of all Ori- 
ental nations. We are Orientals." 

" Oh no, say the most westerly of the west- 
erns," purred an American, soothingly. 

The little man was pleased. " Thanks. 
That is what we hope to believe, but up to 
the present it is not so. Look now. A farmer 
in my country holds a hillside cut into little 
terraces. Every year he must submit to his 
Government a statement of the size and reve- 
nue paid, not on the whole hillside, but on each 
terrace. The complete statement makes a 
pile three inches high, and is of no use when 
it is made except to keep in work thousands 
of officials to check the returns. Is that ad- 
ministration ? By God ! we call it so, but we 
multiply officials by the twenty, and they are 
not administration. What country is such a 
fool ? Look at our Government offices eaten 
up with clerks ! Some day, I tell 3^011, there 
will be a smash." 

This was new to me, but I might have 
guessed it. In every country where swords 
and uniforms accompany civil office there is 
a natural tendency towards an ill-considered 
increase of officialdom. 



1 6 American Notes. 

" You might pay India a visit some day," I 
said. " I fancy that you would find that our 
country shares your trouble." 

Thereupon a Japanese gentleman in the 
Educational Department began to cross-ques- 
tion me on the matters of his craft in India, 
and in a quarter of an hour got from me the 
very little that I knew about primary schools, 
higher education, and the value of an M. A. 
degree. He knew exactly what he wanted to 
ask, and only dropped me when the tooth of 
desire had clean picked the bone of igno- 
rance. 

Then an American held forth, harping on a 
string that has already been too often twanged 
in my ear. " What will it be in America it- 
self ? " 

" The whole system is rotten from top to 
bottom," he said. " As rotten as rotten can 
be." 

" That's so," said the Louisiana man, with 
an affirmative puff of smoke. 

11 They call us a Republic. We may be. I 
don't think it. You Britishers have got the 
only republic worth the name. You choose to 
run your ship of state with a gilt figurehead ; 
but I know, and so does every man who has 
thought about it, that your Queen doesn't cost 
you one-half what our system oi pure democ- 
racy costs us. Politics in America ? There 
aren't any. The whole question of the day is 
spoils. That's all. We fight our souls out 



American Notes. 17 

over tram-contracts, gas-contracts, road-con- 
tracts, and any darned thing that will turn a 
dishonest dollar, and we call that politics. No 
one but a low-down man will run for Congress 
and the Senate — the Senate of the freest 
people on earth are bound slaves to some 
blessed monopoly. If I had money enough, I 
could buy the Senate of the United States, the 
Eagle, and the Star-Spangled Banner com- 
plete." 

" And the Irish vote included ? " said some 
one — a Britisher, I fancy. 

" Certainly, if I chose to go yahooing down 
the street at the tail of the British lion. Any- 
thing dirty will buy the Irish vote. That's 
why our politics are dirty. Some day you 
Britishers will grant Home Rule to the vermin 
in our blankets. Then the real Americans 
will invite the Irish to get up and git to where 
they came from. 'Wish you'd hurry up that 
time before we have another trouble. We're 
bound hand and foot by the Irish vote ; or at 
least that's the excuse for any unusual theft 
that we perpetrate. I tell you there's no good 
in an Irishman except as a fighter. He doesn't 
understand work. He has a natural gift of 
the gab, and he can drink a man blind. These 
three qualifications make him a first-class 
politician." 

With one accord the Americans present 
commenced to abuse Ireland and its people as 
they had met them, and each man prefaced 
2 



1 8 American Notes. 

his commination service with : " I am an 
American by birth — an American from way 
back." 

It must be an awful thing to live in a coun- 
try where you have to explain that you really 
belong there. Louder grew the clamor and 
crisper the sentiments. 

" If we weren't among Americans, I should 
say we were consorting with Russians," said a 
fellow-countryman in my ear. 

" They can't mean what they say," I whis- 
pered. " Listen to this fellow." 

" And I know, for I have been three times 
iround the world and resided in most countries 
on the Continent, that there was never people 
yet could govern themselves." 

" Allah ! This from an American ! " 

" And who should know better than an 
American ? " was the retort. " For the igno- 
rant — that is to say for the majority — there is 
only one argument — fear ; the fear of Death. 
In our case we give any scallawag who comes 
across the water all the same privileges that 
we have made for ourselves. There we make 
a mistake. They thank us by playing the 
fool. Then we shoot them down. You can't 
persuade the mob of any country to become 
decent citizens. If they misbehave them- 
selves, shoot them. I saw the bombs thrown 
at Chicago when our police were blown to bits. 
I saw the banners in the procession that threw 
the bombs. All the mottoes on them were in 



American Notes. 19 

German. The men were aliens in our midst, 
and they were shot down like dogs. I've been 
in labor riots and seen the militia go through 
a crowd like a finger through tissue paper." 

" I was in the riots at New Orleans," said 
the man from Louisiana. " We turned the 
Gatling on the other crowd, and they were 
sick." 

" Whew ! I wonder what would have hap- 
pened if a Gatling had been used when the 
West End riots were in full swing ? " said an 
Englishman. " If a single rioter were killed 
in an English town by the police, the chances 
are that the policeman would have to stand 
his trial for murder and the Ministry of the 
day would go out." 

" Then you've got all your troubles before 
you. The more power you give the people, 
the more trouble they will give. With us our 
better classes are corrupt and our lower classes 
are lawless. There are millions of useful, law- 
abiding citizens, and they are very sick of this 
thing. We execute our justice in the streets. 
The law courts are no use. Take the case of 
the Chicago Anarchists. It was all we could 
do to get 'em hanged ; whereas the dead in 
the streets had been punished offhand. We 
were sure of them. Guess that's the reason 
we are so quick to fire on a mob. But it's 
unfair, all the same. We receive all these 
cattle — Anarchists, Socialists, and ruffians of 
every sort — and then we shoot them. The 



20 American Notes. 

States are as republican as they make 'em. We 
have no use for a man who wants to try any 
more experiments on the Constitution. We 
are the biggest people on God's earth. All 
the world knows that. We've been shouting 
that we are also the greatest people. No one 
cares to contradict us but ourselves ; and we 
are now wondering whether we are what we 
claim to be. Never mind ; you Britishers will 
have the same experiences to go through. 
You're beginning to rot now. Your County 
Councils will make you more rotten because 
you are putting power into the hands of un- 
trained people. When you reach our level, — 
every man with a vote and the right to sell it ; 
the right to nominate fellows of his own kidney 
to swamp out better men, — you'll be what we 
are now — rotten, rotten, rotten ! " 

The voice ceased, and no man rose up to 
contradict. 

" We'll worry through it somehow," said the 
man from Louisiana. " What would do us a 
world of good now would be a big European 
war. We're getting slack and sprawly. Now 
a war outside our borders would make us all 
pull together. But that's a luxury we shan't 
get." 

" Can't you raise one within your own 
borders ? " I said flippantly, to get rid of the 
thought of the great blind nation in her unrest 
putting out her hand to the Sword. Mine was 
a most unfortunate remark. 



American Notes. 21 

" I hope not," said an American, very 
seriously. " We have paid a good deal to keep 
ourselves together before this, and it is not 
likely that we shall split up without protest. 
Yet some say we are too large, and some say 
that Washington and the Eastern States are 
running the whole country. If ever we do 
divide, — God help us when we do, — it will be 
East and West this time." 

" We built the old hooker too long in the 
run. Put the engine-room aft. Break her 
back," said an American who had not yet 
spoken. " 'Wonder if our forebears knew how 
she was going to grow." 

11 A very large country." The speaker 
sighed as though the weight of it from New 
York to 'Frisco lay upon his shoulders. " If 
ever we do divide, it means that we are done 
for. There is no room for four first-class 
empires in the States. One split will lead to 
another if the first is successful. What's the 
use of talking ? " 

What was the use ? Here's our conversa- 
tion as it ran, the night of the Queen's Birth- 
day. What do you think ? 



22 American Notes. 



II. 



" Serene, indifferent to fate, 
Thou sittest at the western gate, 
Thou seest the white seas fold their tents, 
Oh warder of two Continents. 
Thou drawest all things small and great 
To thee beside the Western Gate." 

This is what Bret Harte has written of the 
great city of San Francisco, and for the past 
fortnight I have been wondering what made 
him do it. 

There is neither serenity nor indifference 
to be found in these parts ; and evil would *it 
be for the Continent whose wardship were in- 
trusted to so reckless a guardian. 

Behold me pitched neck-and-crop from 
twenty days of the High Seas, into the whirl 
of California, deprived of any guidance, and 
left to draw my own conclusions. Protect me 
from the wrath of an outraged community if 
these letters be ever read by American eyes. 
San Francisco is a mad city — inhabited for 
the most part by perfectly insane people 
whose women are of a remarkable beauty. 

When the City of Peking steamed through 
the Golden Gate I saw with great joy that the 
block-house which guarded the mouth of the 
" finest harbor in the world, Sir," could be 



American Notes. 23 

silenced by two gunboats from Hong-Kong 
with safety, comfort, and despatch. 

Then a reporter leaped aboard, and ere I 
could gasp held me in his toils. He pumped 
me exhaustively while I was getting ashore, 
demanding, of all things in the world, news 
about Indian journalism. It is an awful thing 
to enter a new land with a new lie on your 
lips. I spoke the truth to the evil-minded 
Custom-house man who turned my most 
sacred raiment on a floor composed of stable- 
refuse and pine-splinters ; but the reporter 
overwhelmed me not so much by his poignant 
audacity as his beautiful ignorance. I am 
sorry now that I did not tell him more lies as 
I passed into a city of three hundred thou- 
sand white men. Think of it ! Three hun- 
dred thousand white men and women gathered 
in one spot, walking upon real pavements in 
front of real plate-glass windowed shops, and 
talking something that was not very different 
from English. It was only when I had 
tangled myself up in a hopeless maze of 
small wooden houses, dust, street-refuse, and 
children who play with empty kerosene tins, 
that I discovered the difference of speech. 

"You want to go to the Palace Hotel?" 
said an affable youth on a dray. " What in 
hell are you doing here, then ? This is about 
the lowest place in the city. Go six blocks 
north to the corner of Geary and Market ; 
then walk around till you strike corner of 



24 American Notes. 

Gutter and Sixteenth, and that brings you 
there." 

I do not vouch for the literal accuracy of 
these directions, quoting but from a dis- 
ordered memory. 

" Amen," I said. " But who am I that I 
should strike the corners of such as you 
name ? Peradventure they be gentlemen of 
repute, and might hit back. Bring it down 
to dots, my son." 

I thought he would have smitten me, but 
he didn't. He explained that no one ever 
used the word " street," and that every one 
was supposed to know how the streets run : 
for sometimes the names were upon the lamps 
and sometimes they weren't. Fortified with 
these directions I proceeded till I found a 
mighty street full of sumptuous buildings four 
or five stories high, but paved with rude 
cobble-stones in the fashion of the Year One. 
A cable-car without any visible means of 
support slid stealthily behind me and nearly 
struck me in the back. A hundred yards 
further there was a slight commotion in the 
street — a gathering together of three or four 
— and something glittered as it moved very 
swiftly. A ponderous Irish gentleman with 
priest's cords in his hat and a small nickel- 
plated badge on his fat bosom emerged from 
the knot, supporting a Chinaman who had 
been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding 
like a pig. The bystanders went their ways. 



American Notes. 25 

and the Chinaman, assisted by the policeman, 
his own. Of course this was none of my 
business, but I rather wanted to know what 
had happened to the gentleman who had 
dealt the stab. It said a great deal for the 
excellence of the municipal arrangements of 
the town that a surging crowd did not at once 
block the street to see what was going for- 
ward. I was the sixth man and the last who 
assisted at the performance, and my curiosity 
was six times the greatest. Indeed, I felt 
ashamed of showing it. 

There were no more incidents till I reached 
the Palace Hotel, a seven-storied warren of 
humanity with a thousand rooms in it. All the 
travel-books will tell you about hotel arrange- 
ments in this country. They should be seen 
to be appreciated. Understand clearly — and 
this letter is written after a thousand miles of 
experiences — that money will not buy you 
service in the West. 

When the hotel clerk — the man who awards 
your room to you and who is supposed to give 
you information — when that resplendent indi- 
vidual stoops to attend to your wants, he does 
so whistling or humming, or picking his teeth, 
or pauses to converse with some one he knows. 
These performances, I gather, are to impress 
upon you that he is a free man and your equal. 
From his general appearance and the size of 
his diamonds he ought to be your superior. 
There is no necessity for this swaggering 



26 American Notes. 

self-consciousness of freedom, Business is 
business, and the man who is paid to attend 
to a man might reasonably devote his whole 
attention to the job. 

In a vast marble-paved hall under the glare 
of an electric light sat forty or fifty men ; and 
for their use and amusement were provided 
spittoons of infinite capacity and generous 
gape. Most of the men wore frock-coats and 
top-hats, — the things that we in India put on 
at a wedding breakfast if we possessed them, 
— but they all spat. They spat on principle. 
The spittoons were on the staircases, in each 
bedroom — yea, and in chambers even more 
sacred than these. They chased one into 
retirement, but they blossomed in chiefest 
splendor round the Bar, and they were all 
used, every reeking one of 'em. 

Just before I began to feel deathly sick, 
another reporter grappled me. What he 
wanted to know was the precise area of India 
in square miles. I referred him to Whittaker. 
He had never heard of Whittaker. He wanted 
it from my own mouth, and I would not tell 
him. Then he swerved off, like the other 
man, to details of journalism in our own 
country. I ventured to suggest that the inte- 
rior economy of a paper most concerned the 
people who worked it. " That's the very 
thing that interests us," he said. " Have you 
got reporters anything like our reporters on 
Indian newspapers ? " " We have not," I said, 



American Notes. 27 

and suppressed the " thank God " rising to my 
lips. " Why haven't you ? " said he. " Be- 
cause they would die," I said. It was exactly 
like talking to a child — a very rude little 
child. He would begin almost every sentence 
with : " Now tell me something about India," 
and would turn aimlessly from one question to 
another without the least continuity. I was 
not angry, but keenly interested. The man 
was a revelation to me. To his questions I 
returned answers mendacious and evasive. 
After all, it really did not matter what I said. 
He could not understand. I can only hope 
and pray that none of the readers of the Pioneer 
will ever see that portentous interview. The 
man made me out to be an idiot several sizes 
more driveling than my destiny intended, and 
the rankness of his ignorance managed to 
distort the few poor facts with which I sup- 
plied him into large and elaborate lies. Then 
thought I : " The matter of American journal- 
ism shall be looked into later on. At present 
I will enjoy myself." 

No man rose to tell me what were the lions 
of the place. No one volunteered any sort of 
conveyance. I was absolutely alone in this 
big city of white folk. By instinct I sought 
refreshment and came upon a bar-room, full 
of bad Salon pictures, in which men with hats 
on the backs of their heads were wolfing food 
from a counter. It was the institution of the 
" Free Lunch " that I had struck. You paid 



28 American Notes. 

for a drink and got as much as you wanted to 
eat. For something less than a rupee a day 
a man can feed himself sumptuously in San 
Francisco, even though he be bankrupt. Re- 
member this if ever you are stranded in these 
parts. 

Later, I began a vast but unsystematic ex- 
ploration of the streets. I asked for no names. 
It was enough that the pavements were full of 
white men and women, the streets clanging 
with traffic, and that the restful roar of a great 
city rang in my ears. The cable-cars glided 
to all points of the compass. I took them 
one by one till I could go no farther. San 
Francisco has been pitched down on the sand 
bunkers of the Bikaneer desert. About one- 
fourth of it is ground reclaimed from the sea 
— any old-timer will tell you all about that. 
The remainder is ragged, unthrifty sand-hills, 
pegged down by houses. 

From an English point of view there has 
not been the least attempt at grading those 
hills, and indeed you might as well try to grade 
the hillocks of Sind. The cable-cars have for 
all practical purposes made San Francisco a 
dead level. They take no count of rise or fall, 
but slide equably on their appointed courses 
from one end to the other of a six-mile street. 
They turn corners almost at right angles ; cross 
other lines, and, for aught I know, may run 
up the sides of houses. There is no visible 
agency of their flight ; but once in a while 



American Notes. 29 

you shall pass a five-storied building, humming 
with machinery that winds up an everlasting 
wire-cable, and the initiated will tell you that 
here is the mechanism. I gave up asking 
questions. If it pleases Providence to make a 
car run up and down a slit in the ground for 
many miles, and if for twopence-halfpenny I 
can ride in that car, why shall I seek the rea- 
sons of the miracle ? Rather let me look out 
of the windows till the shops give place to 
thousands and thousands of little houses made 
of wood — each house just big enough for a 
man and his family. Let me watch the peo- 
ple in the cars, and try to find out in what 
manner they differ from us, their ancestors. 

They delude themselves into the belief that 
they talk English, — the English, — and I have 
already been pitied for speaking with "an 
English accent." The man who pitied me 
spoke, so far as I was concerned, the language 
of thieves. And they all do. Where we put 
the accent forward, they throw it back, and 
vice versa ; where we use the long a, they use 
the short ; and words so simple as to be past 
mistaking, they pronounce somewhere up in 
the dome of their heads. How do these things 
happen ? 

Oliver Wendell Holmes says that Yankee 
schoolmarms, the cider, and the salt codfish 
of the Eastern States are responsible for what 
he calls a nasal accent. A Hindu is a Hindu, 
and a brother to the man who knows his ver- 



30 American Notes. 

nacular ; and a Frenchman is French because 
he speaks his own language ; but the Ameri- 
can has no language. He is dialect, slang, 
provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that 
I have heard their voices, all the beauty of 
Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because I 
find myself catching through the roll of his 
rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar 
fatherland. Get an American lady to read to 
you " How Santa Claus came to Simpson's 
Bar," and see how much is, under her tongue, 
left of the beauty of the original. 

But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It hap- 
pened this way. A reporter asked me what I 
thought of the city, and I made answer suavely 
that it was hallowed ground to me because of 
Bret Harte. That was true. 

"Well," said the reporter, "Bret Harte 
claims California, but California don't claim 
Bret Harte. He's been so long in England 
that he's quite English. Have you seen our 
cracker-factories and the new offices of the 
Examiner V He could not understand that 
to the outside world the city was worth a great 
deal less than the man. 



Night fell over the Pacific, and the white 
sea-fog whipped through the streets, dimming 
the splendors of the electric lights. It is the 
use of this city, her men and women, to parade 
between the hours of eight and ten a certain 



American Notes. 31 

street, called Kearney Street, where the finest 
shops are situated. Here the click of heels 
on the pavement is loudest, here the lights are 
brightest, and here the thunder of the traffic is 
most overwhelming. I watched Young Cali- 
fornia and saw that it was at least expensively 
dressed, cheerful in manner, and self-asserting 
in conversation. Also the women are very 
fair. The maidens were of generous build, 
large, well-groomed, and attired in raiment 
that even to my inexperienced eyes must have 
cost much. Kearney Street, at nine o'clock, 
levels all distinctions of rank as impartially as 
the grave. Again and again I loitered at the 
heels of a couple of resplendent beings, only 
to overhear, when I expected the level voice 
of culture, the staccato " Sez he," " Sez I," 
that is the mark of the white servant-girl all 
the world over. 

This was depressing because, in spite of all 
that goes to the contrary, fine feathers ought 
to make fine birds. There was wealth — un- 
limited wealth — in the streets, but not an ac- 
cent that would not have been dear at fifty 
cents. Wherefore, revolving in my mind that 
these folk were barbarians, I was presently en- 
lightened and made aware that they also were 
the heirs of all the ages, and civilized after all. 
There appeared before me an affable stranger 
of prepossessing appearance, with a blue and 
an innocent eye. Addressing me by name, 
he claimed to have met me in New York at 



32 American Notes. 

the Windsor, and to this claim I gave a quali- 
fied assent. I did not remember the fact, but 
since he was so certain of it, why then — I 
waited developments. 

" And what did you think of Indiana when 
you came through ? " was the next question. 

It revealed the mystery of previous ac- 
quaintance, and one or two other things. 
With reprehensible carelessness, my friend of 
the light-blue eye had looked up the name 
of his victim in the hotel register and read 
" India " for Indiana. 

He could not imagine an Englishman com- 
ing through the States from West to East in- 
stead of by the regularly ordained route. My 
fear was that in his delight at finding me so 
responsive he would make remarks about New 
York and the Windsor which I could not 
understand. And indeed, he adventured in 
this direction once or twice, asking me what I 
thought of such and such streets, which, from 
his tone, I gathered were anything but re- 
spectable. It is trying to talk unknown New 
York in almost unknown San Francisco. But 
my friend was merciful. He protested that I 
was one after his own heart, and pressed upon 
me rare and curious drinks at more than one 
bar. These drinks I accepted with gratitude, 
as also the cigars with which his pockets were 
stored. He would show me the Life of the 
city. Having no desire to watch a weary old 
play again, I evaded the offer, and received in 



American Notes. 33 

lieu of the Devil's instruction much coarse 
flattery. Curiously constituted is the soul of 
man. Knowing how and where this man lied ; 
waiting idly for the finale ; I was distinctly 
conscious, as he bubbled compliments in my 
ear, of soft thrills of gratified pride. I was 
wise, quoth he, anybody could see that with 
half an eye ; sagacious ; versed in the affairs 
of the world ; an acquaintance to be desired ; 
one who had tasted the cup of Life with dis- 
cretion. 

All this pleased me, and in a measure 
numbed the suspicion that was thoroughly 
aroused Eventually the blue-eyed one dis- 
covered, nay insisted, that I had a taste for 
cards (this was clumsily worked in, but it was 
my fault, in that I met him half-way, and al- 
lowed him no chance of good acting). Here- 
upon, I laid my head to one side, and simulated 
unholy wisdom, quoting odds and ends of 
poker-talk, all ludicrously misapplied. My 
friend kept his countenance admirably ; and 
well he might, for five minutes later we ar- 
rived, always by the purest of chances, at 
a place where we could play cards, and also 
frivol with Louisiana State Lottery tickets. 
Would I play ? 

" Nay," said I, " for to me cards have 
neither meaning nor continuity ; but let us 
assume that I am going to play. How would 
you and your friends get to work ? Would 
you play a straight game or make me drunk, 

3 



34 American Notes. 

or — well, the fact is I'm a newspaper man, 
and I'd be much obliged if you'd let me know 
something about bunco-steering." 

My blue-eyed friend cursed me by his gods, 
— the Right and the Left Bower ; he even 
cursed the very good cigars he had given me. 
But, the storm over, he quieted down and ex- 
plained. I apologized for causing him to 
waste an evening, and we spent a very pleasant 
time together. 

Inaccuracy, provincialism, and a too hasty 
rushing to conclusions were the rocks that he 
had split on ; but he got his revenge when he 
said : 

" How would I play with you ? From all 
the poppycock " (Anglice, bosh) " you talked 
about poker, I'd ha' played a straight game 
and skinned you. I wouldn't have taken the 
trouble to make you drunk. You never knew 
anything of the game ; but the way I was 
mistaken in you makes me sick." 

He glared at me as though I had done him 
an injury. To-day I know how it is that, year 
after year, week after week, the bunco-steerer, 
who is the confidence-trick and the card-sharper 
man of other climes, secures his prey. He 
slavers them over with flattery, as the snake 
slavers the rabbit. The incident depressed 
me because it showed I had left the innocent 
East far behind, and was come to a country 
where a man must look out for himself. The 
very hotel glistened with notices about keep- 



American Notes. 35 

ing my door locked, and depositing my valu- 
ables in a safe. The white man in a lump is 
bad. Weeping softly for O-Toyo (little I 
knew then that my heart was to be torn 
afresh from my bosom !), I fell asleep in the 
clanging hotel. 

Next morning I had entered upon the De- 
ferred Inheritance. There are no princes in 
America, — at least with crowns on their heads, 
— but a generous-minded member of some 
royal family received my letter of introduc- 
tion. Ere the day closed I was a member of 
the two clubs and booked for many engage- 
ments to dinner and party. Now this prince, 
upon whose financial operations be continual 
increase, had no reason, nor had the others, his 
friends, to put himself out for the sake of one 
Briton more or less ; but he rested not till he 
had accomplished all in my behalf that a 
mother could think of for her debutcmte daugh- 
ter. Do you know the Bohemian Club of San 
Francisco ? They say its fame extends over 
the world. It was created somewhat on the 
lines of the Savage by men who wrote or drew 
things, and it has blossomed into most unre- 
publican luxury. The ruler of the place is an 
owl — an owl standing upon a skull and cross- 
bones, showing forth grimly the wisdom of the 
man of letters and the end of his hopes for 
immortality. The owl stands on the stair- 
case, a statue four feet high, is carved in the 
woodwork, flutters on the frescoed ceilings, is 



36 American Notes. 

stamped on the note-paper, and hangs on the 
walls. He is an Ancient and Honorable Bird. 
Under his wing 'twas my privilege to meet 
with white men whose lives were not chained 
down to routine of toil, who wrote magazine 
articles instead of reading them hurriedly in 
the pauses of office-work, who painted pictures 
instead of contenting themselves with cheap 
etchings picked up at another man's sale of 
effects. Mine were all the rights of social in- 
tercourse that India, stony-hearted stepmother 
of Collectors, has swindled us out of. Tread- 
ing soft carpets and breathing the incense of 
superior cigars, I wandered from room to 
room studying the paintings in which the 
members of the club had caricatured them- 
selves, their associates, and their aims. There 
was a slick French audacity about the work- 
manship of these men of toil unbending that 
went straight to the heart of the beholder. 
And yet it was not altogether French. A dry 
grimness of treatment, almost Dutch, marked 
the difference. The men painted as they 
spoke — with certainty. The club indulges in 
revelries which it calls " jinks " — high and 
low, — at intervals, — and each of these gather- 
ings is faithfully portrayed in oils by hands 
that know their business. In this club were 
no amateurs spoiling canvas because they 
fancied they could handle oils without knowl- 
edge of shadows or anatomy — no gentleman 
of leisure ruining the temper of publishers and 



American Notes. 37 

an already ruined market with attempts to 
write " because everybody writes something 
these days." 

My hosts were working, or had worked, for 
their daily bread with pen or paint, and their 
talk for the most part was of the shop shoppy 
— that is to say, delightful. They extended a 
large hand of welcome and were as brethren, 
and I did homage to the Owl and listened to 
their talk. An Indian Club about Christmas- 
time will yield, if properly worked, an abun- 
dant harvest of queer tales ; but at a gathering 
of Americans from the uttermost ends of their 
own continent the tales are larger, thicker, 
more spinous, and even more azure than any 
Indian variety. Tales of the War I heard 
told by an ex-officer of the South over his 
evening drink to a Colonel of the Northern 
army ; my introducer, who had served as a 
trooper in the Northern Horse, throwing in 
emendations from time to time. 

Other voices followed with equally won- 
drous tales of riata-throwing in Mexico or 
Arizona, of gambling at army posts in Texas, 
of newspaper wars waged in godless Chicago,, 
of deaths sudden and violent in Montana and 
Dakota, of the loves of half-breed maidens in 
the South, and fantastic huntings for gold in 
mysterious Alaska. Above all, they told the 
story of the building of old San Francisco, 
when the " finest collection of humanity on 
God's earth, Sir, started this town, and the 



38 American Notes. 

water came up to the foot of Market Street." 
Very terrible were some of the tales, grimly 
humorous the others, and the men in broad- 
cloth and fine linen who told them had played 
their parts in them. 

'" And now and again when things got too 
Tsad they would toll the city bell, and the 
Vigilance Committee turned out and hanged 
the suspicious characters. A man didn't 
begin to be suspected in those days till he had 
committed at least one unprovoked murder," 
said a calm-eyed, portly old gentleman. 

I looked at the pictures around me, the 
noiseless, neat-uniformed waiter behind me, 
the oak-ribbed ceiling above, the velvety car- 
pet beneath. It was hard to realize that even 
twenty years ago you could see a man hanged 
with great pomp. Later on I found reason to 
change my opinion. The tales gave me a 
headache and set me thinking. How in the 
world was it possible to take in even one- 
thousandth of this huge, roaring, many-sided 
Icontinent ? In the silence of the sumptuous 
library lay Professor Bryce's book on the 
American Republic. 

" It is an omen," said I. " He has done 
all things in all seriousness, and he may be 
purchased for half a guinea. Those who 
desire information of the most undoubted 
must refer to his pages. For me is the daily 
round- of vagabondage, the recording of the 
incidents of the hour, and talk with the trav- 



American Notes. 39 

eling companion of the day. I will not c do ' 
this country at all." 

And I forgot all about India for ten days 
while I went out to dinners and watched the 
social customs of the people, which are entirely 
different from our customs, and was introduced 
to the men of many millions. These persons 
are harmless in their earlier stages ; that is to 
say, a man worth three or four million dollars 
may be a good talker, clever, amusing, and of 
the world ; a man with twice that amount is to 
be avoided ; and a twenty-million man is — 
just twenty millions. Take an instance. I 
was speaking to a newspaper man about seeing 
the proprietor of his journal. My friend 
snorted indignantly : 

" See him / Great Scott ! No / If he hap- 
pens to appear in the office, I have to asso- 
ciate with him ; but, thank Heaven, outside 
of that I move in circles where he cannot 
come." 

And yet the first thing I have been taught 
to believe is that money was everything in 
America 1 



40 American Notes. 






ill. 

" Poor men — God made, and all for that ! " 

It was a bad business throughout, and the 
only consolation is that it was all my fault. 

A man took me round the Chinese quarter 
of San Francisco, which is a ward of the city 
of Canton set down in the most eligible busi- 
ness-quarter of the place. 

The Chinaman with his usual skill has pos- 
sessed himself of good brick fire-proof build- 
ings and, following instinct, has packed each 
tenement with hundreds of souls, all living in 
filth and squalor not to be appreciated save 
by you in India. That cursory investigation 
ought to have sufficed ; but I wanted to know 
how deep in the earth the Pig-tail had taken 
root. Therefore I explore the Chinese quar 
ter a second time and alone, which was fool- 
ishness. No one in the filthy streets (but for 
the blessed sea breezes San Francisco would 
enjoy cholera every season) interfered with 
my movements, though many asked for cum- 
shaw. I struck a house about four stories 
high full of celestial abominations, and began 
to burrow down ; having heard that these tene- 
ments were constructed on the lines of ice- 
bergs — two-thirds below sight level. Down- 



American Notes. 41 

stairs I crawled past Chinamen in bunks, 
opium-smokers, brothels, and gambling hells, 
till I had reached the second cellar — was, in 
fact, in the labyrinths of a warren. Great is 
the wisdom of the Chinaman. In time of 
trouble that house could be razed to the 
ground by the mob, and yet hide all its inhab- 
itants in brick-walled and wooden-beamed 
subterranean galleries, strengthened with iron- 
framed doors and gates. On the second 
underground floor a man asked for cwiishaw 
and took me down-stairs to yet another cellar, 
where the air was as thick as butter, and the 
lamps burned little holes in it not more than 
an inch square. In this place a poker club 
had assembled and was in full swing. The 
Chinaman loves " pokel," and plays it with 
great skill, swearing like a cat when he loses. 
Most of the men round the table were in semi- 
European dress, their pig-tails curled up under 
billy-cock hats. One of the company looked 
like a Eurasian, whence I argued that he was 
a Mexican — a supposition that later inquiries 
confirmed. They were a picturesque set of 
fiends and polite, being too absorbed in their 
game to look at the stranger. We were all 
deep down under the earth, and save for the 
rustle of a blue gown sleeve and the ghostly 
whisper of the cards as they were shuffled 
and played, there was no sound. The heat 
was almost unendurable. There was some 
dispute between the Mexican and the man on 



42 American Notes. 

his left. The latter shifted his place to put 
the table between himself and his opponent, 
and stretched a lean yellow hand towards the 
Mexican's winnings. 

Mark how purely man is a creature of in- 
stinct. Rarely introduced to the pistol, I saw 
the Mexican half rise in his chair and at the 
same instant found myself full length on the 
floor. None had told me that this was the 
best attitude when bullets are abroad. I was 
there prone before I had time to think — drop- 
ping as the room was filled with an intolerable 
clamor like the discharge of a cannon. In those 
close quarters the pistol report had no room to 
spread any more than the smoke — then acrid 
in my nostrils. There was no second shot, but 
a great silence in which I rose slowly to my 
knees. The Chinaman was gripping the table 
with both hands and staring in front of him at 
an empty chair. The Mexican had gone, and 
a little whirl of smoke was floating near the 
roof. Still gripping the table, the Chinaman 
said : " Ah ! " in the tone that a man would 
use when, looking up from his work suddenly, 
he sees a well-known friend in the doorway. 
Then he coughed and fell over to his own 
right, and I saw that he had been shot in the 
stomach. 

I became aware that, save for two men 
leaning over the stricken one, the room was 
empty ; and all the tides of intense fear, hith- 
erto held back by intenser curiosity, swept 



American Notes. 43 

over my soul. I ardently desired the outside 
air. It was possible that the Chinamen would 
mistake me for the Mexican, — everything 
horrible seemed possible just then, — and it 
was more than possible that the stairways 
would be closed while they were hunting for 
the murderer. The man on the floor coughed 
a sickening cough. I heard it as I fled, and 
one of his companions turned out the lamp. 
Those stairs seemed interminable, and to add 
to my dismay there was no sound of commo- 
tion in the house. No one hindered, no one 
even looked at me. There was no trace of 
the Mexican. I found the doorway and, my 
legs trembling under me, reached the protec- 
tion of the clear cool night, the fog, and the 
rain. I dared not run, and for the life of me 
I could not walk. I must have effected a 
compromise, for I remember the light of a 
street lamp showed the shadow of one half 
skipping — caracoling along the pavements in 
what seemed to be an ecstasy of suppressed 
happiness. But it was fear — deadly fear. 
Fear compounded of past knowledge of the 
Oriental — only other white man — available 
witness — three stories underground — and the 
cough of the Chinaman now some forty feet 
under my clattering boot-heels. It was good 
to see the shop-fronts and electric lights again. 
Not for anything would I have informed the 
police, because I firmly believed that the 
Mexican had been dealt with somewhere down 



44 American Notes. 

there on the third floor long ere I had reached 
the air ; and, moreover, once clear of the 
place, I could not for the life of me tell where 
it was. My ill-considered flight brought me 
out somewhere a mile distant from the hotel ; 
and the clank of the lift that bore me to a bed 
six stories above ground was music in my 
ears. Wherefore I would impress it upon you 
who follow after, do not knock about the 
Chinese quarters at night and alone. You 
may stumble across a picturesque piece of 
human nature that will unsteady your nerves 
for half a day. 



And this brings me by natural sequence to 
the great drink question. As you know, of 
course, the American does not drink at meals 
as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no 
meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day. 
Also he has no decent notions about the sun 
being over the yard-arm or below the horizon. 
He pours his vanity into himself at unholy 
hours, and indeed he can hardly help it. You 
have no notion of what " treating " means on 
the Western slope. It is more than an insti- 
tution ; it is a religion, though men tell me that 
it is nothing to what it was. Take a very com- 
mon instance. At 10.30 a.m. a man is smit- 
ten with a desire for stimulants. He is in 
the company of two friends. All three ad- 
journ to the nearest bar, — seldom more than 



American Notes. 45 

twenty yards away, — and take three straight 
whiskies. They talk for two minutes. The 
second and third man then treats in order ; and 
thus each walks into the street, two of them 
the poorer by three goes of whisky under their 
belt and one with two more liquors than he 
wanted. It is not etiquette yet to refuse a 
treat. The result is peculiar. I have never 
yet, I confess, seen a drunken man in the 
streets, but I have heard more about drunken- 
ness among white men, and seen more decent 
men above or below themselves with drink, 
than I care to think about. And the vice 
runs up into all sorts of circles and societies. 
Never was I more astonished than at one 
pleasant dinner party to hear a pair of pretty 
lips say casually of a gentleman friend then 
under discussion, "He was drunk." The 
fact was merely stated without emotion. That 
was what startled me. But the climate of 
California deals kindly with excess, and 
treacherously covers up its traces. A man 
neither bloats nor shrivels in this dry air. 
He continues with the false bloom of health 
upon his cheeks, an equable eye, a firm 
mouth, and a steady hand till a day of reckon- 
ing arrives, and suddenly breaking up, about 
the head, he dies, and his friends speak his 
epitaph accordingly. Why people who in 
most cases cannot hold their liquor should 
play with it so recklessly I leave to others to 
decide. This unhappy state of affairs has, 



46 American Notes. 



however, produced one good result which 
will confide to you. In the heart of the busi 
ness quarter, where banks and bankers are 
thickest, and telegraph wires most numerous, 
stands a semi-subterranean bar tended by a 
German with long blond locks and a crystal- 
line eye. Go thither softly, treading on the 
tips of your toes, and ask him for a Button 
Punch. 'Twill take ten minutes to brew, but 
the result is the highest and noblest product 
of the age. No man but one knows what is 
in it. I have a theory it is compounded of 
the shavings of cherubs' wings, the glory of a 
tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and 
fragments of lost epics by dead masters. But 
try you for yourselves, and pause a while to 
bless me, who am always mindful of the 
truest interests of my brethren. 

But enough of the stale spilth of bar-rooms. 
Turn now to the august spectacle of a Gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, for the 
people, as it is understood in the city of San 
Francisco. Professor Bryce's book will tell 
you that every American citizen over twenty- 
one years of age possesses a vote. He may 
not know how to run his own business, con- 
trol his wife, or instil reverence into his chil- 
dren, may be pauper, half-crazed with drink, 
bankrupt, dissolute, or merely a born fool ; 
but he has a vote. If he likes, he can be 
voting most of his time — voting for his State 
Governor, his municipal officers, local option, 



:e 



American Notes. 47 

sewage contracts, or anything else of which 
he has no special knowledge. 

Once every four years he votes for a new 
President. In his spare moments he votes 
for his own judges — the men who shall 
give him justice. These are dependent on 
popular favor for re-election inasmuch as they 
are but chosen for a term of years — two or 
three, I believe. Such a position is mani- 
festly best calculated to create an independ- 
ent and unprejudiced administrator. Now 
this mass of persons who vote is divided into 
two parties — Republican and Democrat. They 
are both agreed in thinking that the other 
part is running creation (which is America) 
into red flame. Also the Democrat as a party 
drinks more than the Republican, and when 
drunk may be heard to talk about a thing 
called the Tariff, which he does not under- 
stand, but which he conceives to be the bul- 
wark of the country or else the surest power 
for its destruction. Sometimes he says one 
thing and sometimes another, in order to 
contradict the Republican, who is always con- 
tradicting himself. And this is a true and 
lucid account of the forepart of American 
politics. The behind-part is otherwise. 

Since every man has a vote and may vote 
on every conceivable thing, it follows that 
there exist certain wise men who understand 
the art of buying up votes retail, and vending 
them wholesale to whoever wants them most 



48 American Notes. 

urgently. Now an American engaged in 
making a home for himself has not time to 
vote for turncocks and district attorneys and 
cattle of that kind, but the unemployed have 
much time because they are always on hand 
somewhere in the streets. They are called 
" the boys," and form a peculiar class. The 
boys are young men ; inexpert in war, un- 
skilled in labor ; who have neither killed a 
man, lifted cattle, or dug a well. In plain 
English, they are just the men in the streets 
who can always be trusted to rally round any 
cause that has a glass of liquor for a visible 
heart. They wait — they are on hand — ; and 
in being on hand lies the crown and the glory 
of American politics. The wise man is he 
who, keeping a liquor saloon and judiciously 
dispensing drinks, knows how to retain within 
arm's reach a block of men who will vote for 
or against anything under the canopy of 
Heaven. Not every saloon-keeper can do 
this. It demands careful study of city poli- 
tics, tact, the power of conciliation, and infi- 
nite resources of anecdote to amuse and keep 
the crowd together night after night, till the 
saloon becomes a salon. Above all, the 
liquor side of the scheme must not be worked 
for immediate profit. The boys who drink so 
freely will ultimately pay their host a thou- 
sandfold. An Irishman, and an Irishman 
pre-eminently, knows how to work such a 
saloon parliament. Observe for a moment 



American Notes. 49 

the plan of operations. The rank and file 
are treated to drink and a little money — and 
they vote. He who controls ten votes re- 
ceives a proportionate reward ; the dispenser 
of a thousand votes is worthy of reverence, 
and so the chain runs on till we reach the 
most successful worker of public saloons — the 
man most skilful in keeping his items to- 
gether and using them when required. Such 
a man governs the city as absolutely as a 
king. And you would know where the gain 
comes in ? The whole of the public offices of 
a city (with the exception of a very few where 
special technical skill is required) are short-term 
offices distributed accordingto " political " lean- 
ings. What would you have ? A big city re- 
quires many officials. Each office carries a sal- 
ary and influence worth twice the pay. The 
offices are for the representatives of the men 
who keep together and are on hand to vote. 
The Commissioner of Sewage, let us say, is a 
gentleman who has been elected to his office by 
a Republican vote. He knows little and cares 
less about sewage, but he has sense enough 
to man the pumping-works and the street- 
sweeping - machines with the gentlemen 
who elected him. The Commissioner of 
Police has been helped to his post very 
largely by the influence of the boys at such 
and such a saloon. He may be the guardian 
of city morals, but he is not going to allow 
his subordinates to enforce early closing or 
4 



50 American Notes. 

abstention from gambling in that saloon. 
Most offices are limited to four years, conse- 
quently he is a fool who does not make his 
office pay him while he is in it. 

The only people who suffer by this happy 
arrangement are, in fact, the people who de- 
vised the lovely system. And they suffer 
because they are Americans. Let us explain. 
As you know, every big city here holds at 
least one big foreign vote — generally Irish, 
frequently German. In San Francisco, the 
gathering place of the races, there is a distinct 
Italian vote to be considered, but the Irish 
vote is more important. For this reason the 
Irishman does not kill himself with overwork. 
He is made for the cheery dispensing of 
liquors, for everlasting blarney, and possesses 
a wonderfully keen appreciation of the weak- 
nesses of lesser human nature. Also he has 
no sort of conscience, and only one strong 
conviction — that of deep-rooted hatred toward 
England. He keeps to the streets, he is on 
hand, he votes joyously, spending days lavish- 
ly, — and time is the American's dearest com- 
modity. Behold the glorious result. To-day 
the city of San Francisco is governed by the 
Irish vote and the Irish influence, under the 
rule of a gentleman whose sight is impaired, 
and who requires a man to lead him about the 
streets. He is called officially " Boss Buck- 
ley," and unofficially the " Blind White Devil." 
I have before me now the record of his 



American Notes. 51 

amiable career in black and white. It occupies 
four columns of small print, and perhaps you 
would think it disgraceful. Summarized, it is 
as follows : Boss Buckley, by tact and deep 
knowledge of the seamy side of the city, won 
himself a following of voters. He sought no 
office himself, or rarely : but as his following 
increased he sold their services to the highest 
bidder, himself taking toll of the revenues of 
every office. He controlled the Democratic 
party in the city of San Francisco. The 
people appoint their own judges. Boss Buck- 
ley's people appointed judges. These judges 
naturally were Boss Buckley's property. I 
have been to dinner parties and heard edu- 
cated men, not concerned with politics, telling 
stories one to another of " justice,'' both civil 
and criminal, being bought with a price from 
the hands of these judges. Such tales they 
told without heat, as men recording facts. 
Contracts for road-mending, public buildings, 
and the like are under the control of Boss 
Buckley, because the men whom Buckley's 
following sent to the City Council adjudicate 
on these contracts ; and on each and every one 
of these contracts Boss Buckley levies his 
percentage for himself and his allies. 

The Republican party in San Francisco also 
have their boss. He is not so great a genius 
as Boss Buckley, but I decline to believe that 
he is any whit more virtuous. He has a 
smaller number of votes at his command. 



52 American Notes. 



IV. 



I have been watching machinery in repose 
after reading about machinery in action. 

An excellent gentleman who bears a name 
honored in the magazines writes, much as 
Disraeli orated, of " the sublime instincts of 
an ancient people," the certainty with which 
they can be trusted to manage their own af- 
fairs in their own way, and the speed with 
which they are making for all sorts of desir- 
able goals. This he called a statement or 
purview of American politics. 

I went almost directly afterwards to a saloon 
where gentlemen interested in ward politics 
nightly congregate. They were not pretty 
persons. Some of them were bloated, and 
they all swore cheerfully till the heavy gold 
watch-chains on their fat stomachs rose and 
fell again ; but they talked over their liquor as 
men who had power and unquestioned access 
to places of trust and profit. 

The magazine-writer discussed theories of 
government ; these men the practice. They 
had been there. They knew all about it. 
They banged their fist on the table and spoke 
of political " pulls," the vending of votes, and 
so forth. Theirs was not the talk of village 
babblers reconstructing the affairs of the na- 



American Notes. 53 

tion, but of strong, coarse, lustful men fighting 
for spoil and thoroughly understanding the 
best methods of reaching it. I listened long 
and intently to speech I could not understand, 
or only in spots. It was the speech of busi- 
ness, however. I had sense enough to know 
that, and to do my laughing outside the door. 
Then I began to understand why my pleasant 
and well-educated hosts in San Francisco 
spoke with a bitter scorn of such duties of 
citizenship as voting and taking an interest in 
the distribution of offices. Scores of men 
have told me with no false pride that they 
would as soon concern themselves with the 
public affairs of the city or State as rake 
muck. Read about politics as the cultured 
writer of the magazines regards 'em, and then, 
and not till then, pay your respects to the 
gentlemen who run the grimy reality. 

I'm sick of interviewing night-editors, who, 
in response to my demand for the record of a 
prominent citizen, answers : " Well, you see, he 
began by keeping a saloon," etc. I prefer to 
believe that my informants are treating me as 
in the old sinful days in India I was used to 
treat our wandering Globe-trotters. They 
declare that they speak the truth, and the 
news of dog-politics lately vouchsafed to me in 
groggeries incline me to believe — but I won't. 
The people are much too nice to slangander 
as recklessly as I have been doing. Besides, 
I am hopelessly in love with about eight 



54 American Notes. 

American maidens — all perfectly delightful 
till the next one comes into the room. 
O-Toyo was a darling, but she lacked sev- 
eral things ; conversation, for one. You can- 
not live on giggles. She shall remain un- 
moved at Nagasaki while I roast a battered 
heart before the shrine of a big Kentucky 
blonde who had for a nurse, when she was 
little, a negro "mammy." By consequence 
she has welded on to Californian beauty, Paris 
dresses, Eastern culture, Europe trips, and 
wild Western originality, the queer dreamy 
superstitions of the negro quarters, and the 
result is soul-shattering. And she is but one 
of many stars. Item, a maiden who believes 
in education and possesses it, with a few hun- 
dred thousand dollars to boot, and a taste for 
slumming. Item, the leader of a sort of in- 
formal salon where girls congregate, read 
papers, and daringly discuss metaphysical 
problems and candy — a sloe-eyed, black- 
browed imperious maiden. Item, a very small 
maiden, absolutely without reverence, who can 
in one swift sentence trample upon and leave 
gasping half a dozen young men. Item, a 
millionairess, burdened with her money, lonely, 
caustic, with a tongue keen as a sword, 
yearning for a sphere, but chained up to the 
rock of her vast possessions. Item, a type- 
writer-maiden earning her own bread in this 
big city, because she doesn't think a girl ought 
to be a burden on her parents. She quotes 



American Notes. 55 

Theophile Gautier, and moves through the 
world manfully, much respected, for all her 
twenty inexperienced summers. Item, a 
woman from Cloudland who has no history in 
the past, but is discreetly of the present, and 
strives for the confidences of male humanity on 
the grounds of " sympathy." (This is not al- 
together a new type.) Item, a girl in a " dive " 
blessed with a Greek head and eyes that seem 
to speak all that is best and sweetest in the 
world. But wo is me ! — she has no ideas in 
this world or the next, beyond the consumption 
of beer (a commission on each bottle), and 
protests that she sings the songs allotted to 
her nightly with no more than the vaguest 
notion of their meaning. 

Sweet and comely are the maidens of Dev- 
onshire ; delicate and of gracious seeming 
those who live in the pleasant places of Lon- 
don ; fascinating for all their demureness the 
damsels of France clinging closely to their 
mothers, and with large eyes wondering at the 
wicked world ; excellent in her own place and 
to those who understand her is the Anglo- 
Indian " spin " in her second season ; but the 
girls of America are above and beyond them 
all. They are clever ; they can talk. Yea, it 
is said that they think. Certainly they have 
an appearance of so doing. They are original, 
and look you between the brows with un- 
abashed eyes as a sister might look at her 
brother. They are instructed in the folly and 



56 American Notes. 

vanity of the male mind, for they have associ- 
ated with " the boys " from babyhood, and can 
discerningly minister to both vices, or pleas- 
antly snub the possessor. They possess, 
moreover, a life among themselves, independ- 
ent of masculine associations. They have 
societies and clubs and unlimited tea-fights 
where all the guests are girls. They are self- 
possessed without parting with any tenderness 
that is their sex-right ; they understand ; they 
can take care of themselves ; they are superbly 
independent. When you ask them what 
makes them so charming, they say : " It is be- 
cause we are better educated than your girls 
and — and we are more sensible in regard to 
men. We have good times all around, but 
we aren't taught to regard every man as a 
possible husband. Nor is he expected to 
marry the first girl he calls on regularly." Yes, 
they have good times, their freedom is large, 
and they do not abuse it. They can go driv- 
ing with young men, and receive visits from 
young men to an extent that would make an 
English mother wink with horror ; and neither 
driver nor drivee have a thought beyond the 
enjoyment of a good time. As certain also of 
their own poets have said : — 

" Man is fire and woman is tow, 
And the devil he comes and begins to blow." 

In America the tow is soaked in a solution 
that makes it fireproof, in absolute liberty 



American Notes. 57 

and large knowledge : consequently accidents 
do not exceed the regular percentage arranged 
by the Devil for each class and climate under 
the skies. But the freedom of the young girl 
has its drawbacks. She is — I say it with all 
reluctance — irreverent, from her forty-dollar 
bonnet to the buckles in her eighteen-dollar 
shoes. She talks flippantly to her parents 
and men old enough to be her grandfather. 
She has a prescriptive right to the society of 
the Man who Arrives. The parents admit it. 
This is sometimes embarrassing, especially 
when you call on a man and his wife for the 
sake of information ; the one being a mer- 
chant of varied knowledge, the other a woman 
of the world. In five minutes your host has 
vanished. In another five his wife has fol- 
lowed him, and you are left with a very charm- 
ing maiden doubtless, but certainly not the 
person you came to see. She chatters and 
you grin ; but you leave with the very strong 
impression of a wasted morning. This has 
been my experience once or twice. I have 
even said as pointedly as I dared to a man : 
" I came to see you." " You'd better see me 
in my office, then. The house belongs to my 
women-folk — to my daughter, that is to say." 
He spoke with truth. The American of 
wealth is owned by his family. They exploit 
him for bullion, and sometimes it seems to me 
that his lot is a lonely one. The women get 
the ha'pence ; the kicks are all his own. 



58 American Notes 

Nothing is too good for an American's 
daughter (I speak here of the moneyed 
classes). The girls take every gift as a mat- 
ter of course. Yet they develop greatly when 
a catastrophe arrives and the man of many 
millions goes up or goes down and his 
daughters take to stenography or typewriting. 
I have heard many tales of heroism from the 
lips of girls who counted the principals among 
their friends. The crash came ; Mamie or 
Hattie or Sadie gave up their maid, their car- 
riages and candy, and with a No. 2 Reming- 
ton and a stout heart set about earning their 
daily bread. 

" And did I drop her from the list of my 
friends? No, sir," said a scarlet-lipped vision 
in white lace. " That might happen to me 
any day." 

It may be this sense of possible disaster 
in the air that makes San Franciscan society 
go with so captivating a rush and whirl. 
Recklessness is in the air. I can't explain 
where it comes from, but there it is. The 
roaring winds off the Pacific make you drunk 
to begin with. The agressive luxury on all 
sides helps out the intoxication, and you spin 
for ever " down the ringing groves of change " 
(there is no small change, by the way, west of 
the Rockies) as long as money lasts. They 
make greatly and they spend lavishly ; not only 
the rich but the artisans, who pay nearly five 
pounds for a suit of clothes and for other lux- 



American Notes 59 

uries in proportion. The young men rejoice 
in the days of their youth. They gamble, 
yacht, race, enjoy prize-fights and cock-fights — 
the one openly, the other in secret — thev estab- 
lish luxurious clubs; they breo u Uremselves 
over horse-flesh and — other things ; and they 
are instant in quarrel. At twenty they are 
experienced in business ; embark in vast en- 
terprises, take partners as experienced as them- 
selves, and go to pieces with as much splen- 
dor as their neighbors. Remember that the men 
who stocked California in the Fifties were 
physically, and as far as regards certain tough 
virtues, the pick of the earth. The inept and the 
weakly died en route or went under in the days 
of construction. To this nucleus were added 
all the races of the Continent — French, Italian, 
German, and, of course, the Jew. The result 
you shall see in large-boned, deep-chested, 
delicate-handed women, and long, elastic, 
well-built boys. It needs no little golden badge 
swinging from his watch-chain to mark the 
Native Son of the Golden West — the country- 
bred of California. Him I love because he is 
devoid of fear, carries himself like a man, and 
has a heart as big as his boots. I fancy, too, 
he knows how to enjoy the blessings of life 
that his world so abundantly bestows upon 
him. At least I heard a little rat of a creature 
with hock-bottle shoulders explaining that a 
man from Chicago could pull the eye-teeth of 
a Californian in business. Well, if I lived in 



6o American Notes 



Fairyland, where cherries were as big as plums, 
plums as big as apples, and strawberries of no 
account ; where the procession of the fruits 
of fe« seasons was like a pageant in a Drury 
Lane pa. c nime and where the dry air was 
wine, I should let business slide once in a way 
and kick up my heels with my fellows. The 
tale of the resources of California — vegetable 
and mineral — is a fairy tale. You can read 
it in books. You would never believe me. 
All manner of nourishing food from sea-fish to 
beef may be bought at the lowest prices ; and 
the people are well developed and of a high 
stomach. They demand ten shillings for tin- 
kering a jammed lock of a trunk ; they receive 
sixteen shillings a day for working as carpen- 
ters ; they spend many sixpences on very bad 
cigars, and they go mad over a prize-fight. 
When they disagree, they do so fatally, with 
fire-arms in their hands, and on the public 
streets. I was just clear of Mission Street 
when the trouble began between two gentle- 
men, one of whom perforated the other. When 
a policeman, whose name I do not recollect, 
" fatally shot Ed. Kearney," for attempting to 
escape arrest, I was in the next street. For 
these things I am thankful. It is enough to 
travel with a policeman in a tram-car and while 
he arranges his coat-tails as he sits down, to 
catch sight of a loaded revolver. It is enough 
to know that fifty per cent, of the men in the 
public saloons carry pistols about them. The 






American Notes 61 

Chinaman waylays his adversary and methodi- 
cally chops him to pieces with his hatchet. 
Then the Press roar about the brutal ferocity 
of the Pagan. The Italian reconstructs his 
friend with a long knife. The Press com- 
plains of the waywardness of the alien. The 
Irishman and the native Californian in their 
hours of discontent use the revolver, not once, 
but six times. The Press records the fact, and 
asks in the next column whether the world can 
parallel the progress of San Francisco. The 
American who loves this country will tell you 
that this sort of thing is confined to the lower 
classes. Just at present an ex-judge who was 
sent to jail by another judge (upon my word, 
I cannot tell whether these titles mean any- 
thing) is breathing red-hot vengeance against 
his enemy; The papers have interviewed both 
parties and confidently expect a fatal issue. 

Now let me draw breath and curse the negro 
waiter and through him the negro in service 
generally. He has been made a citizen with 
a vote ; consequently both political parties 
play with him. But that is neither here nor 
there. He will commit in one meal every 
betise that a scullion fresh from the plow- 
tail is capable of, and he will continue to re- 
peat those faults. He is as complete a heavy- 
footed, uncomprehending, bungle-fisted fool as 
any memsahib in the East ever took into hei 
establishment. But he is according to law a 
free and independent citizen — consequently 



62 American Notes 

above reproof or criticism. He, and he alone, 
in this insane city will wait at table (the 
Chinaman doesn't count). He is untrained, 
inept, but he will fill the place and draw the 
pay. Now God and his father's Kismet made 
him intellectually inferior to the Oriental. He 
insists on pretending that he serves tables by 
accident — as a sort of amusement. He wishes 
you to understand this little fact. You wish 
to eat your meals, and if possible to have them 
properly served. He is a big, black, vain 
baby and a man rolled into one. A colored 
gentleman who insisted on getting me pie 
when I wanted something else, demanded 
information about India. I gave him some 
facts about wages. " Oh hell," said he, cheer- 
fully, " that wouldn't keep me in cigars for a 
month." Then he fawned on me for a ten- 
cent piece. Later he took it upon himself to 
pity the natives of India — " heathen " he 
called them, this Woolly One whose race has 
been the butt of every comedy on the Asiatic 
stage since the beginning. And I turned and 
saw by the head upon his shoulders that he 
was a Yoruba man, if there be any truth in 
ethnological castes. He did his thinking in 
English, but he was a Yoruba negro, and the 
race type had remained the same throughout 
his generations. And the room was full of 
other races — some that looked exactly like 
Gallas (but the trade was never recruited 
from that side of Africa), some duplicates of 



American Notes 63 

Cameroon heads, and some Kroomen. if ever 
Kroomen wore evening dress. The American 
does not consider little matters of descent, 
though by this time he ought to know all 
about " damnable heredity." As a general 
rule he keeps himself very far from the negro 
and says unpretty things about him. There 
are six million negroes more or less in the 
States, and they are increasing. The Amer- 
icans once having made them citizens cannot 
unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, 
they ought to be elevated by education. He 
is trying this : but it is like to be a long job, 
because black blood is much more adhesive 
than white, and throws back with annoying 
persistence. When the negro gets a religion 
he returns directly as a hiving bee, to the 
first instincts of his people. Just now a wave 
of religion is sweeping over some of the 
Southern States. Up to the present, two 
Messiahs and one Daniel have appeared ; and 
several human sacrifices have been offered up 
to these incarnations. The Daniel managed 
to get three young men, who he insisted were 
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to walk 
into a blast furnace ; guaranteeing non- 
combustion. They did not return. I have 
seen nothing of this kind, but I have attended 
a negro church. The congregation were 
moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and 
one of them danced up the aisle to the 
mourners' bench. The motive may have been 



64 American Notes 






genuine. The movements of the shaken body 
were those of a Zanzibar stick-dance, such as 
you see at Aden on the coal boats ; and even 
as I watched the people, the links that bound 
them to the white man snapped one by one, 
and I saw before me — the hubshi (the Woolly 
One) praying to the God he did not under- 
stand. Those neatly dressed folk on the 
benches, the gray-headed elder by the window, 
were savages — neither more nor less. What 
will the American do with the negro ? The 
South will not consort with him. In some 
States miscegenation is a penal offense. The 
North is every year less and less in need of 
his services.' And he will not disappear. He 
will continue as a problem. His friends will 
urge that he is as good as the white man. 
His enemies ... it is not good to be a negro 
in the land of the free and the home of the 
brave. 

But this has nothing to do with San Fran- 
cisco and her merry maidens, her strong, 
swaggering men, and her wealth of gold and 
pride. They bore me to a banquet in honor 
of a brave Lieutenant — Carlin, of the Van- 
dalia — who stuck by his ship in the great 
cyclone at Apia and comported himself as an 
officer should. On that occasion — 'twas at 
the Bohemian Club — I heard oratory with the 
roundest of o's ; and devoured a dinner the 
memory of which will descend with me into 
the hungry grave. There were about forty 



American Notes 65 

speeches delivered ; and not one of them was 
average or ordinary. It was my first intro- 
duction to the American Eagle screaming for 
all it was worth. The Lieutenant's heroism 
served as a peg from which those silver- 
tongued ones turned themselves loose and 
kicked. They ransacked the clouds of sunset, 
the thunderbolts of Heaven, the deeps of Hell, 
and the splendors of the Resurrection, for 
tropes and metaphors, and hurled the result at 
the head of the guest of the evening. Never 
since the morning stars sang together for joy, 
I learned, had an amazed creation witnessed 
such superhuman bravery as that displayed by 
the American navy in the Samoa cyclone, 
Till earth rotted in the phosphorescent star- 
and-stripe slime of a decayed universe that 
Godlike gallantry would not be forgotten. I 
grieve that I cannot give the exact words. 
My attempt at reproducing their spirit is pale 
and inadequate. I sat bewildered on a corus- 
cating Niagara oi — blatherumskite. It was 
magnificent — it was stupendous ; and I was 
conscious of a wicked desire to hide my face 
in a napkin and grin. Then, according to 
rule, they produced their dead, and across the 
snowy tablecloths dragged the corpse of every 
man slain in the Civil War, and hurled defiance 
at " our natural enemy " (England, so please 
you !) " with her chain of fortresses across the 
world." Thereafter they glorified their nation 
afresh, from the beginning, in case any detail 

5 



66 American Notes 

should have been overlooked, and that made 
me uncomfortable for their sakes. How in 
the world can a white man, a Sahib of Our 
blood, stand up and plaster praise on his own 
country ? He can think as highly as he likes, 
but his open-mouthed vehemence of adoration 
struck me almost as indelicate. My hosts 
talked for rather more than three hours, and 
at the end seemed ready for three hours more. 
But when the Lieutenant — such a big, brave, 
gentle giant ! — rose to his feet, he delivered 
what seemed to me as the speech of the even- 
ing. I remember nearly the whole of it, and 
it ran something in this way : " Gentlemen — 
it's very good of you to give me this dinner 
and to tell me all these pretty things, but 
what I want you to understand — the fact is — 
what we want and what we ought to get at 
once is a navy — more ships — lots of 'em — " 
Then we howled the top of the roof off, and I, 
for one, fell in love with Carlin on the spot. 
Wallah ! He was a man. 

The Prince among merchants bade me take 
no heed to the warlike sentiments of some of 
the old Generals. " The sky-rockets are 
thrown in for effect," quoth he, " and when- 
ever we get on our hind legs we always ex- 
press a desire to chaw up England. It's a 
sort of family affair." 

And indeed, when you come to think of it, 
there is no other country for the American 
public speaker to trample upon. 



American Notes 67 

France has Germany ; we have Russia ; for 
Italy, Austria is provided ; and the humblest 
Pathan possesses an ancestral enemy. Only 
America stands out of the racket ; and there- 
fore, to be in fashion, makes a sand-bag of 
the mother-country, and bangs her when oc- 
casion requires. " The chain of fortresses " 
man, a fascinating talker, explained to me 
after the affair that he was compelled to blow 
off steam. Everybody expected it. When we 
had chanted " The Star-Spangled Banner " not 
more than eight times, we adjourned. America 
is a very great country, but it is not yet Heaven 
with electric lights and plush fittings, as the 
speakers professed to believe. My listening 
mind went back to the politicians in the saloon 
who wasted no time in talking about freedom, 
but quietly made arrangements to impose their 
will on the citizens. " The Judge is a great 
man, but give thy presents to the Clerk," as 
the proverb saith. 

And what more remains to tell ? I cannot 
write connectedly, because I am in love with 
all those girls aforesaid and some others who 
do not appear in the invoice. The type-writer 
girl is an institution of which the comic papers 
make much capital, but she is vastly conven- 
ient. She and a companion rent a room in a 
business quarter, and copy manuscript at the 
rate of six annas a page. Only a woman can 
manage a type-writing machine, because she 
has served apprenticeship to the sewing- 



68 American Notes 

machine. She can earn as much as a hundred 
dollars a month, and professes to regard this 
form of bread-winning as her natural destiny. 
But oh how she hates it in her heart of hearts ! 
When I had got over the surprise of doing 
business and trying to give orders to a young 
woman of coldly clerkly aspect, intrenched be- 
hind gold-rimmed spectacles, I made inquiries 
concerning the pleasures of this independ- 
ence. They liked it — indeed, they did. 
'Twas the natural fate of almost all girls, — 
the recognized custom in America, — and 
I was a barbarian not to see it in that 
light. 

" Well, and after ? " said I. " What hap- 
pens ? " 

" We work for our bread." 

" And then what do you expect ? " 

" Then we shall work for our bread." 

" Till you die ? " 

" Ye-es — unless " 

" Unless what ? A man works till he 
dies." 

" So shall we." This without enthusiasm 
— " I suppose." 

Said the partner in the firm audaciously : 
" Sometimes we marry our employers — at least 
that's what the newspapers say." The hand 
banged on half a dozen of the keys of the 
machine at once. " Yes, I don't care. I 
hate it — I hate it — I hate it, and you needn't 
look so ! " 



American Notes 69 

The senior partner was regarding the rebel 
with grave-eyed reproach. 

" I thought you did," said I. " I don't sup- 
pose American girls are much different from 
English ones in instinct." 

" Isn't it Theophile Gautier who says that 
the only differences between country and 
country lie in the slang and the uniform of the 
police ? " 

Now in the name of all the Gods at once, 
what is one to say to a young lady (who in 
England would be a Person) who earns her 
own bread, and very naturally hates the em- 
ploy, and slings out-of-the-way quotations at 
your head ? That one falls in love with her 
goes without saying ; but that is not enough. 

A mission should be established. 



70 American Notes 



v. 



" I walked in the lonesome even, 
And who so sad as I, 
As I saw the young men and maidens 
Merrily passing by ? " 

San Francisco has only one drawback. 
'Tis hard to leave. When like the pious Hans 
Breitmann I " cut that city by the sea " it was 
with regrets for the pleasant places left be- 
hind, for the men who were so clever, and the 
women who were so witty, for the " dives," 
the beer-halls, the bucket-shops, and the poker- 
hells where humanity was going to the Devil 
with shouting and laughter and song and the 
rattle of dice-boxes. I would fain have stayed, 
but I feared that an evil end would come to 
me when my money was all spent and I de- 
scended to the street corner. A voice inside 
me said : " Get out of this. Go north. Strike 
for Victoria and Vancouver. Bask for a day 
under the shadow of the old flag." So I set 
forth from San Francisco to Portland in 
Oregon, and that was a railroad run of thirty- 
six hours. 

The Oakland railway terminus, whence all 
the main lines start, does not own anything 
approaching to a platform. A yard with a 
dozen or more tracks is roughly asphalted, 



American Notes 71 

and the traveler laden with handbags skips 
merrily across the metals in search of his own 
particular train. The bells of half a dozen 
shunting engines are tolling suggestively in 
his ears. If he is run down, so much the 
worse for him. " When the bell rings, look 
out for the locomotive." Long use has made 
the nation familiar and even contemptuous to- 
wards trains to an extent which God never 
intended. Women who in England would 
gather up their skirts and scud timorously 
over a level crossing in the country, here talk 
dress and babies under the very nose of the 
cow-catcher, and little children dally with the 
moving car in a manner horrible to behold. 
We pulled out at the wholly insignificant speed 
of twenty-five miles an hour through the streets 
of a suburb of fifty thousand, and in our prog- 
ress among the carts and the children and 
shop fronts slew nobody ; at which I was not 
a little disappointed. 

When the negro porter bedded me up for 
the night and I had solved the problem of 
undressing while lying down, — I was much 
cheered by the thought that if anything hap- 
pened I should have to stay where I was and 
wait till the kerosene lamps set the overturned 
car alight and burned me to death. It is 
easier to get out of a full theater than to 
leave a Pullman in haste. 

By the time I had discovered that a profu- 
sion of nickel-plating, plush, and damask does 



72 American Notes 

not compensate for closeness and dust, the 
train ran into the daylight on the banks of 
the Sacramento River. A few windows were 
gingerly opened after the bunks had been re- 
converted into seats, but that long coffin-car 
was by no means ventilated, and we were a 
gummy, grimy crew who sat there. At six in 
the morning the heat was distinctly unpleas- 
ant, but seeing with the eye of the flesh 
that I was in Bret Harte's own country, I 
rejoiced. There were the pines and madrone- 
clad hills his miners lived and fought among ; 
there was the heated red earth that showed 
whence the gold had been washed ; the dry 
gulch, the red, dusty road where Hamblin 
was used to stop the stage in the intervals of 
his elegant leisure and superior card-play; 
there was the timber felled and sweating resin 
in the sunshine ; and, above all, there was 
the quivering pungent heat that Bret Harte 
drives into your dull brain with the magic of 
his pen. When we stopped at a collection of 
packing-cases dignified by the name of a 
town, my felicity was complete. The name 
of the place was something offensive, — Am- 
berville or Jacksonburgh, — but it owned a 
cast-iron fountain worthy of a town of thirty 
thousand. Next to the fountain was a 
" hotel," at least seventeen feet high including 
the chimney, and next to the hotel was the 
forest — the pine, the oak, and the untram- 
melled undergrowth of the hillside. A cinna- 



American Notes 73 

mon-bear cub — Baby Sylvester in the very 
fur — was tied to the stump of a tree opposite 
the fountain ; a pack-mule dozed in the dust- 
haze, a red-shirted miner in a slouch hat 
supported the hotel, a blue-shirted miner 
swung round the corner, and the two went 
indoors for a drink. A girl came out of the 
only other house but one, and shading her 
eyes with a brown hand stared at the panting 
train. She didn't recognize me, but I knew 
her — had known her for years. She was 
M'liss. She never married the schoolmaster, 
after all, but stayed, always young and alwa3'S 
fair, among the pines. I knew Red-Shirt 
too. He was one of the bearded men who 
stood back when Tennessee claimed his 
partner from the hands of the Law. The 
Sacramento River, a few yards away, shouted 
that all these things were true. The train 
went on while Baby Sylvester stood on his 
downy head, and M'liss swung her sun-bonnet 
by the strings. 

" What do you think ? " said a lawyer who 
was traveling with me. " It's a new world 
to you; isn't it? " 

" No. It's quite familiar. I was never 
out of England ; it's as if I saw it all." 

Quick as light came the answer : " ' Yes, 
they lived once thus at Venice when the 
miners were the kings.' " 

I loved that lawyer on the spot. We drank 
to Bret Harte who, you remember, " claimed 



74 American Notes 

California, but California never claimed him. 
He's turned English." 

Lying back in state, I waited for the flying 
miles to turn over the pages of the book I 
knew. They brought me all I desired — from 
Man of no Account sitting on a stump and 
playing with a dog, to " that most sarcastic 
man, the quiet Mister Brown." He boarded 
the train from out of the woods, and there 
was venom and sulphur on his tongue. He 
had just lost a lawsuit. Only Yuba Bill 
failed to appear. The train had taken his 
employment from him. A nameless ruffian 
backed me into a corner and began telling me 
about the resources of the country, and what 
it would eventually become. All I remember 
of his lecture was that you could catch trout 
in the Sacramento River — the stream that we 
followed so faithfully. 

Then rose a tough and wiry old man with 
grizzled hair and made inquiries about the 
trout. To him was added the secretary of a 
life-insurance company. I fancy he was 
traveling to rake in the dead that the train 
killed. But he, too, was a fisherman, and the 
two turned to meward. The frankness of a 
Westerner is delightful. They tell me that in 
the Eastern States I shall meet another type 
of man and a more reserved. The Califor- 
nian always speaks of the man from the New 
England States as a different breed. It is 
our Punjab and Madras over again, but more 



American Notes 75 

so. The old man was on a holiday in search 
of fish. When he discovered a brother-loafer 
he proposed a confederation of rods. Quoth 
the insurance-agent, "I'm not staying any 
time in Portland, but I will introduce you to 
a man there who'll tell you about fishing." 
The two told strange tales as we slid through 
the forests and saw afar off the snowy head 
of a great mountain. There were vineyards, 
fruit orchards, and wheat fields where the 
land opened out, and every ten miles or so, 
twenty or thirty wooden houses and at least 
three churches. A large town would have a 
population of two thousand and an infinite 
belief in its own capacities. Sometimes a 
flaring advertisement flanked the line, calling 
for men to settle down, take up the ground, 
and make their home there. At a big town 
we could pick up the local newspaper, narrow 
as the cutting edge of a chisel and twice as 
keen — a journal filled with the prices of 
stock, notices of improved reaping and bind- 
ing machines, movements of eminent citizens 
— " whose fame beyond their own abode ex- 
tends — for miles along the Harlem road." 
There was not much grace about these 
papers, but all breathed the same need for 
good men, steady men who would plow, 
and till, and build schools for their children, 
and make a township in the hills. Once only 
I found a sharp change in the note and a 
very pathetic one. I think it was a young 



76 American Notes 

soul in trouble who was writing poetry. The 
editor had jammed the verses between the 
flamboyant advertisement of a real-estate 
agent — a man who sells you land and lies 
about it — and that of a Jew tailor who dis- 
posed of " nobby " suits at " cut-throat 
prices." Here are two verses ; I think they 
tell their own story : — 

" God made the pine with its root in the earth, 
Its top in the sky ; 
They have burned the pine to increase the worth 
Of the wheat and the silver rye. 

" Go weigh the cost of the soul of the pine 
Cut off from the sky ; 
And the price of the wheat that grows so fine 
And the worth of the silver rye ! " 

The thin-lipped, keen-eyed men who boarded 
the train would not read that poetry, or, if 
they did, would not understand. Heaven 
guard that poor pine in the desert and keep 
" its top in the sky ! " 

When the train took to itself an extra 
engine and began to breathe heavily, some 
one said that we were ascending the Siskiyou 
Mountains. We had been climbing steadily 
from San Francisco, and at last won ' to over 
four thousand feet above sea-level, always 
running through forest. Then, naturally 
enough, we came down, but we dropped two 
thousand two hundred feet in about thirteen 
miles. It was not so much the grinding of 
the brakes along the train, or the sight of 



American Notes 77 

three curves of track apparently miles below 
us, or even the vision of a goods-train appar- 
ently just under our wheels, or even the tun- 
nels, that made me reflect ; it was the trestles 
over which we crawled, — trestles something 
over a hundred feet high and looking like a 
collection of match-sticks. 

" I guess our timber is as much a curse as 
a blessing," said the old man from Southern 
California. " These trestles last very well for 
five or six years ; then they get out of repair, 
and a train goes through 'em, or else a forest 
fire burns 'em up." 

This was said in the middle of a groaning, 
shivering trestle. An occasional plate-layer 
took a look at us as we went down, but that 
railway didn't waste men on inspection duty. 
Very often there were cattle on the track, 
against which the engine used a diabolical 
form of whistling. The old man had been a 
driver in his youth, and beguiled the way with 
cheery anecdotes of what might be expected if 
we fouled a young calf. 

" You see, they get their legs under the 
cow-catcher, and that'll put an engine off the 
line. I remember when a hog wrecked an 
excursion-train and killed sixty people. 'Guess 
the engineer will look out, though." 

There is considerably too much guessing 
about this large nation. As one of them put 
it rather forcibly : " We guess a trestle will 
stand forever, and we guess that we can 



78 American Notes 

patch up a washout on the track, and we 
guess the road's clear, and sometimes we 
guess ourselves into the deepot, and some- 
times we guess ourselves into Hell." 

# # * # # 

The descent brought us far into Oregon 
and a timber and wheat country. We drove 
through wheat and pine in alternate slices, but 
pine chiefly, till we reached Portland, which 
is a city of fifty thousand, possessing the 
electric light of course, equally, of course, 
devoid of pavements, and a port of entry 
about a hundred miles from the sea at which 
big steamers can load. It is a poor city that 
cannot say it has no equal on the Pacific 
coast. Portland shouts this to the pines 
which run down from a thousand-foot ridge 
clear up to the city. You may sit in a be- 
dizened bar-room furnished with telephone 
and clicker, and in half an hour be in the 
woods. 

Portland produces lumber and jig-saw fit- 
tings for houses, and beer and buggies, and 
bricks and biscuit ; and, in case you should 
miss the fact, there are glorified views of the 
town hung up in public places with the value 
of the products set down in dollars. All this 
is excellent and exactly suitable to the opening 
of a new country ; but when a man tells you 
it is civilization, you object. The first thing 
that the civilized man learns to do is to keep 
the dollars in the background, because they 



American Notes 79 

are only the oil of the machine that makes life 
go smoothly. 

Portland is so busy that it can't attend to its 
own sewage or paving, and the four-story 
brick blocks front cobble-stones and plank 
sidewalks and other things much worse. I 
saw a foundation being dug out. The sewage 
of perhaps twenty years ago, had thoroughly 
soaked into the soil, and there was a familiar 
and Oriental look about the compost that flew 
up with each shovel-load. Yet the local 
papers, as was just and proper, swore there 
was no place like Portland, Oregon, U. S. A., 
chronicled the performances of Oregonians, 
" claimed " prominent citizens elsewhere as 
Oregonians, and fought tooth and nail for 
dock, rail, and wharfage projects. And you 
could find men who had thrown in their lives 
with the city, who were bound up in it, and 
worked their life out for what they conceived 
to be its material prosperity. Pity it is to 
record that in this strenuous, laboring town 
there had been, a week before, a shooting-case. 
One well-known man had shot another on the 
street, and was now pleading self-defense, 
because the other man had, or the murderer 
thought he had, a pistol about him. Not 
content with shooting him dead, he squibbed 
off his revolver into him as he lay. I read 
the pleadings, and they made me ill. So far 
as I could judge, if the dead man's body had 
been found with a pistol on it, the shooter 



80 American Notes 

would have gone free. Apart from the mere 
murder, cowardly enough in itself, there was a 
refinement of cowardice in the plea. Here in 
this civilized city the surviving brute was afraid 
he would be shot — fancied he saw the other 
man make a motion to his hip-pocket, and so 
on. Eventually the jury disagreed. And the 
degrading thing was that the trial was reported 
by men who evidently understood all about 
the pistol, was tried before a jury who were 
versed in the etiquette of the hip-pocket, and 
was discussed on the streets by men equally 
initiate. 

But let us return to more cheerful things. 
The insurance-agent introduced us as friends 
to a real-estate man, who promptly bade us go 
up the Columbia River for a day while he 
made inquiries about fishing. There was no 
overwhelming formality. The old man was 
addressed as " California," I answered indif- 
ferently to " England " or "Johnny Bull," and 
the real-estate man was " Portland." This 
was a lofty and spacious form of address. 

So California and I took a steamboat, and 
upon a sumptuous blue and gold morning 
steered up the Willamette River, on which 
Portland stands, into the great Columbia — the 
river that brings the salmon that goes into the 
tin that is emptied into the dish when the ex- 
tra guest arrives in India. California intro- 
duced me to the boat and the scenery, showed 
me the " texas," the difference between a " tow- 



American Notes 81 

head " and a " sawyer," and the precise nature 
of a " slue." All I remember is a delightful 
feeling that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn 
and Mississippi Pilot were quite true, and that 
I could almost recognize the very reaches 
down which Huck and Jim had drifted. We 
were on the border line between Oregon State 
and Washington Territory, but that didn't 
matter. The Columbia was the Mississippi so 
far as I was concerned. We ran along the 
sides of wooded islands whose banks were 
caving in with perpetual smashes, and we 
skipped from one side to another of the mile- 
wide stream in search of a channel, exactly 
like a Mississippi steamer, and when we 
wanted to pick up or set down a passenger we 
chose a soft and safe place on the shore and 
ran our very snub nose against it. California 
spoke to each new passenger as he came 
aboard and told me the man's birthplace. A 
long-haired tender of kine crashed out of the 
underwood, waved his hat, and was taken 
aboard forthwith. " South Carolina," said 
California, almost without looking at him. 
" When he talks you will hear a softer dialect 
than mine." And it befell as he said : where- 
at I marveled, and California chuckled. 
Every island in the river carried fields of rich 
wheat, orchards, and a white, wooden-house ; 
or else, if the pines grew very thickly, a saw- 
mill, the tremulous whine of whose saws flick- 
ered across the water like the drone of a tired 
6 



82 American Notes 

bee. From remarks he let fall I gathered that 
California owned timber ships and dealt in 
lumber, had ranches too, a partner, and every- 
thing handsome about him ; in addition to a 
checkered career of some thirty-five years. 
But he looked almost as disreputable a loafer 
as I. 

" Say, young feller, we're going to see 
scenery now. You shout and sing," said 
California, when the bland wooded islands 
gave place to bolder outlines, and the steamer 
ran herself into a hornet's nest of black-f anged 
rocks not a foot below the boiling broken 
water. We were trying to get up a slue, or 
back channel, by a short cut, and the stern- 
wheel never spun twice in the same direction. 
Then we hit a floating log with a jar that ran 
through our system, and then, white-bellied, 
open-gilled, spun by a dead salmon — a lordly 
twenty-pound Chinook salmon who had per- 
ished in his pride. " You'll see the salmon- 
wheels 'fore long," said a man who lived " way 
back on the Washoogle," and whose hat was 
spangled with trout-flies. " Those Chinook 
salmon never rise to the fly. The canneries 
take them by the wheel." At the next bend 
we sighted a wheel — an infernal arrangement 
of wire-gauze compartments worked by the 
current and moved out from a barge in shore 
to scoop up the salmon as he races up the 
river. California swore long and fluently at 
the sight, and the more fluently when he was 



American Notes 83 

told of the weight of a good night's catch — ■ 
some thousands of pounds. Think of the 
black and bloody murder of it ! But you out 
yonder insist in buying tinned salmon, and 
the canneries cannot live by letting down lines. 
About this time California was struck with 
madness. I found him dancing on the fore- 
deck shouting, " Isn't she a daisy ? Isn't she 
a darling ? " He had found a waterfall — a 
blown thread of white vapor that broke from 
the crest of a hill — a waterfall eight hundred 
and fifty feet high whose voice was even 
louder than the voice of the river. " Bridal 
Veil," jerked out the purser. " D — n that 
purser and the people who christened her ! 
Why didn't they call her Mechlin lace Falls at 
fifty dollars a yard while they were at it ? " 
said Califprnia. And I agreed with him. 
There are many " bridal veil " falls in this 
country, but few, men say, lovelier than those 
that come down to the Columbia River. 
Then the scenery began — poured forth with 
the reckless profusion of Nature, who when 
she wants to be amiable succeeds only in be- 
ing oppressively magnificent. The river was 
penned between gigantic stone walls crowned 
with the ruined bastions of Oriental palaces. 
The stretch of green water widened and was 
guarded by pine-clad hills three thousand feet 
high. A wicked devil's thumb nail of rock 
shot up a hundred feet in midstream. A 
sand-bar of blinding white sand gave prom- 



84 American Notes 

ise of flat country that the next bend denied ; 
for, lo ! we were running under a triple tier 
of fortifications, lava-topped, pine-clothed, and 
terrible. Behind them the white dome of 
Mount Hood ran fourteen thousand feet into 
the blue, and at their feet the river threshed 
among a belt of cottonwood trees. There I 
sat down and looked at California half out of 
the boat in his anxiety to see both sides of the 
river at once. He had seen my note-book, 
and it offended him. " Young feller, let her 
go — and you shut your head. It's not you 
nor anybody like you can put this down. 
Black, the novelist, he could. He can de- 
scribe salmon-fishing, he can." And he glared 
at me as though he expected me to go and 
do likewise. 

" I can't. I know it," I said hiynbly. 

" Then thank God that you came along this 
way." 

We reached a little railway, on an island, 
which was to convey us to a second steamer, 
because, as the purser explained, the river 
was a " trifle broken." We had a six-mile 
run, sitting in the sunshine ' on a dummy- 
wagon, whirled just along the edge of the 
river-bluffs. Sometimes we dived into the 
fragrant pine woods, ablaze with flowers ; but 
we generally watched the river now narrowed 
into a turbulent millrace. Just where the 
whole body of water broke in riot over a 
series of cascades, the United States Govern- 



American Notes 85 

ment had chosen to build a lock for steamers, 
and the stream was one boiling, spouting 
mob of water. A log shot down the race, 
struck on a rock, split from end to end, and 
rolled over in white foam. I shuddered be- 
cause my toes were not more than sixty feet 
above the log, and I feared that a stray 
splinter might have found me. But the train 
ran into the river on a sort of floating trestle, 
and I was upon another steamer ere I fully 
understood why. The cascades were not two 
hundred yards below us, and when we cast 
off to go upstream, the rush of the river, ere 
the wheel struck the water, dragged us as 
though we had been towed. Then the country 
opened out, and California mourned for his 
lost bluffs and crags, till we struck a rock 
wall four hundred feet high, crowned by the 
gigantic figure of a man watching us. On a 
rocky island we saw the white tomb of an 
old-time settler who had made his money in 
San Francisco, but who had chosen to be 
buried in an Indian burying-ground. A de- 
cayed wooden " wickyup," where the bones of 
the Indian dead are laid, almost touched the 
tomb. The river ran into a canal of basaltic 
rock, painted in yellow, vermilion, and green 
by Indians and, by inferior brutes, adorned 
with advertisements of " bile beans." We 
had reached The Dalles — the center of a 
great sheep and wool district, and the head 
of navigation. 



86 American Notes 

When an American arrives at a new town 
it is his bounden duty to " take it in." Cali- 
fornia swung his coat over his shoulder with 
the gesture of a man used to long tramps, and 
together, at eight in the evening, we explored 
The Dalles. The sun had not yet set, and it 
would be light for at least another hour. All 
the inhabitants seemed to own a little villa and 
one church apiece. The young men were out 
walking with the young maidens, the old folks 
were sitting on the front steps, — not the ones 
that led to the religiously shuttered best draw- 
ing-room, but the side-front steps, — and the 
husbands and wives were tying back pear trees 
or gathering cherries. A scent of hay reached 
me, and in the stillness we could hear the 
cattle bells as the cows came home across the 
lava-sprinkled fields. California swung down 
the wooden pavements, audibly criticising the 
housewives' hollyhocks and the more perfect 
ways of pear-grafting, and, as the young men 
and maidens passed, giving quaint stories of 
his youth. I felt that I knew all the people 
aforetime, I was so interested in them and 
their life. A woman hung over a gate talk- 
ing to another woman, and as I passed I 
heard her say, " skirts," and again, " skirts," 
and " I'll send you over the pattern " ; and I 
knew they were talking dress. We stumbled 
upon a young couple saying good-by in the 
twilight, and " When shall I see you again ? " 
quoth he ; and I understood that to the doubt- 



American Notes 87 

ing heart the tiny little town we paraded in 
twenty minutes might be as large as all Lon- 
don and as impassable as an armed camp. I 
gave them both my blessing, because " When 
shall I see you again ? " is a question that 
lies very near to hearts of all the world. The 
last garden gate shut with a click that traveled 
far down the street, and the lights of the 
comfortable families began to shine in the 
confidingly uncurtained windows. 

11 Say, Johnny Bull, doesn't all this make 
you feel lonesome ? " said California. " Have 
you got any folks at home ? So've I — a wife 
and five children — and I'm only on a holiday." 

" And I'm only on a holiday," I said, and 
we went back to the Spittoon-wood Hotel. 
Alas ! for the peace and purity of the little 
town that I had babbled about. At the back 
of a shop, and discreetly curtained, was a 
room where the young men who had been 
talking to the young maidens could play poker 
and drink and swear, and on the shop were 
dime novels of bloodshed to corrupt the mind 
of the little boy, and prurient servant-girl-slush 
yarns to poison the mind of the girl. Cali- 
fornia only laughed grimly, He said that all 
these little one-house towns were pretty much 
the same all over the States. 

That night I dreamed I was back in India 
with no place to sleep in ; tramping up and 
down the Station mall and asking everybody, 
" When shall I see you again ? " 



88 American Notes 



VI. 



" The race is neither to the swift nor the battle to 
the strong ; but time and chance cometh to all." 

I have lived ! 

The American Continent may now sink 
under the sea, for I have taken the best that 
it yields, and the best was neither dollars, 
love, nor real estate. 

Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing 
Club, who whip the reaches of the Tavi, and 
you who painfully import trout to Ootacamund, 
and I will tell you how " old man California n 
and I went fishing, and you shall envy. 

We returned from the Dalles to Portland 
by the way we had come, the steamer stopping 
en route to pick up a night's catch of one of 
the salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver 
it at a cannery down-stream. 

When the proprietor of the wheel announced 
that his take was two thousand two hundred 
and thirty pounds' weight of fish, " and not a 
heavy catch, neither," I thought he lied. But 
he sent the boxes aboard, and I counted the 
salmon by the hundred — huge fifty-pounders, 
hardly dead, scores of twenty and thirty- 
pounders, and a host of smaller fish. 

The steamer halted at a rude wooden ware- 



American Notes 89 

house built on piles in a lonely reach of the 
river, and sent in the fish. I followed them 
up a scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the 
cannery. The crazy building was quivering 
with the machinery on its floors, and a glit- 
tering bank of tin-scraps twenty feet high 
showed where the waste was thrown after the 
cans had been punched. Only Chinamen 
were employed on the work, and they looked 
like blood-besmeared yellow devils, as they 
crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the 
floor. When our consignment arrived, the 
rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as 
they were dumped down under a jet of water, 
and the salmon burst out in a stream of quick- 
silver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty- 
pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two 
swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal 
arrangements with a third, and cast it into a 
bloody-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped 
from under his hands as though they were 
facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them 
from the vat and thrust them under a thing 
like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed 
them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can. 
More Chinamen with yellow, crooked fingers, 
jammed the stuff into the cans, which slid 
down some marvelous machine forthwith, 
soldering their own tops as they passed. Each 
can was hastily tested for flaws, and then sunk, 
with a hundred companions, into a vat of 
boiling water, there to be half cooked for a 



90 American Notes 

few minutes. The cans bulged slightly after 
the operation, and were therefore slidden 
along by the trolleyful to men with needles 
and soldering irons, who vented them, and 
soldered the aperture. Except for the label, 
the " finest Columbia salmon " was ready for 
the market. I was impressed, not so much 
with the speed of the manufacture, as the 
character of the factory. Inside, on a floor 
ninety by forty, the most civilized and mur- 
derous of machinery. Outside, three foot- 
steps, the thick-growing pines and the im- 
mense solitude of the hills. Our steamer only 
stayed twenty minutes at that place, but I 
counted two hundred and forty finished cans, 
made from the catch of the previous night, 
ere I left the slippery, blood-stained, scale- 
spangled, oily floors, and the offal-smeared 
Chinamen. 

We reached Portland, California and I, 
crying for salmon, and the real-estate man, to 
whom we had been intrusted by " Portland " 
the insurance man, met us in the street saying 
that fifteen miles away, across country, we 
should come upon a place called Clackamas 
where we might perchance find what we 
desired. And California, his coat-tails flying 
in the wind, ran to a livery stable and char- 
tered a wagon and team forthwith. I could 
push the wagon about with one hand, so light 
was its structure. The team was purely 
American — that is to say, almost human in its 



American Notes 91 

intelligence and docility. Some one said that 
the roads were not good on the way to Clack- 
amas and warned us against smashing the 
springs. " Portland," who had watched the 
preparations, finally reckoned " he'd come 
along too," and under heavenly skies we three 
companions of a day set forth ; California 
carefully lashing our rods into the carriage, 
and the bystanders overwhelming us with 
directions as to the sawmills we were to pass, 
the ferries we were to cross, and the sign-posts 
we were to seek signs from. Half a mile 
from this city of fifty thousand souls we struck 
(and this must be taken literally) a plank-road 
that would have been a disgrace to an Irish 
village. 

Then six miles of macadamized road showed 
us that the team could move. A railway ran 
between us and the banks of the Willamette, 
and another above us through the mountains. 
All the land was dotted with small townships, 
and the roads were full of farmers in their 
town wagons, bunches of tow-haired, boggle- 
eyed urchins sitting in the hay behind. The 
men generally looked like loafers, but their 
women were all well dressed. Brown hussar- 
braiding on a tailor-made jacket does not, 
however, consort with hay-wagons. Then we 
Struck into the woods along what California 
called a " ca?nina reale" — a good road, — and 
Portland a " fair track." It wound in and out 
among fire-blackened stumps, under pine 



92 American Notes 

trees, along the corners of log-fences, through 
hollows which must be hopeless marsh in the 
winter, and up absurd gradients. But no- 
where throughout its length did I see any evi- 
dence of road-making. There was a track, — 
you couldn't well get off it, — and it was all you 
could do to stay on it. The dust lay a foot 
thick in the blind ruts, and under the dust we 
found bits of planking and bundles of brush- 
wood that sent the wagon bounding into the 
air. Sometimes we crashed through bracken ; 
anon where the blackberries grew rankest we 
found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden 
rails all awry, and the pitiful stumpy headstones 
nodding drunkenly at the soft green mulleins. 
Then with oaths and the sound of rent under- 
wood a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down 
a " skid " road, hauling a forty-foot log along 
a rudely made slide. A valley full of wheat 
and cherry trees succeeded, and halting at a 
house we bought ten pound weight of luscious 
black cherries for something less than a rupee 
and got a drink of icy-cold water for nothing, 
while the untended team browsed sagaciously 
by the roadside. Once we found a wayside 
camp of horse-dealers lounging by a pool, 
ready for a sale or a swap, and once two 
sun-tanned youngsters shot down a hill on 
Indian ponies, their full creels banging from 
the high-pommeled saddles. They had been 
fishing, and were our brethren therefore. We 
shouted aloud in chorus to scare a wild-cat ; 



American Notes 93 

we squabbled over the reasons that had led a 
snake to cross a road ; we heaved bits of bark 
at a venturesome chipmunk, who was really 
the little gray squirrel of India and had come 
to call on me ; we lost our way and got the 
wagon so beautifully fixed on a steep road 
that we had to tie the two hind-wheels to get 
it down. Above all, California told tales of 
Nevada and Arizona, of lonely nights spent 
out prospecting, of the slaughter of deer and 
the chase of men; of woman, lovely woman, 
who is a firebrand in a Western city, and 
leads to the popping of pistols, and of the sud- 
den changes and chances of Fortune, who de- 
lights in making the miner or the lumberman 
a quadruplicate millionaire, and in " busting " 
the railroad king. That was a day to be re- 
membered, and it had only begun when we 
drew rein at a tiny farmhouse on the banks of 
the Clackamas and sought horse-feed and 
lodging ere we hastened to the river that 
broke over a weir not a quarter of a mile 
away. 

Imagine a stream seventy yards broad 
divided by a pebbly island, running over 
seductive riffles, and swirling into deep, quiet 
pools where the good salmon goes to smoke 
his pipe after meals. Set such a stream amid 
fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills 
of pine, throw in where you please quiet 
water, log-fenced meadows, and a hundred- 
foot bluff just to keep the scenery from grow- 



94 American Notes 

ing too monotonous, and you will get some 
faint notion of the Clackamas. 

Portland had no rod. He held the gaff and 
the whisky. California sniffed, upstream and 
downstream across the racing water, chose 
his ground, and let the gaudy spoon drop in 
the tail of a riffle. I was getting my rod to- 
gether when I heard the joyous shriek of the 
reel and the yells of California, and three feet 
of living silver leaped into the air far across 
• the water. The forces were engaged. The 
salmon tore up stream, the tense line cutting 
the water like a tide-rip behind him, and the 
light bamboo bowed to breaking. What hap- 
pened after I cannot tell. California swore 
and prayed, and Portland shouted advice, and 
I did all three for what appeared to be half a 
day, but was in reality a little over a quarter 
of an hour, and sullenly our fish came home 
with spurts of temper, dashes head-on, and 
sarabands in the air ; but home to the bank 
came he, and the remorseless reel gathered up 
the thread of his life inch by inch. We 
landed him in a little bay, and the spring- 
weight checked at eleven and a half pounds. 
Eleven and one-half pounds of fighting sal- 
mon ! We danced a war-dance on the pebbles, 
and California caught me round the waist in 
a hug that went near to breaking my ribs 
while he shouted : " Partner ! Partner ! 
This is glory 1 Now you catch your fish 1 
Twenty-four years I've waited for this 1 " 



American Notes 95 

• 

I went into that icy-cold river and made my 
cast just above a weir, and all but foul-hooked 
a blue and black water-snake with a coral 
mouth who coiled herself on a stone and hissed 
maledictions. The next cast — ah, the pride 
of it, the regal splendor of it ! the thrill that 
ran down from finger-tip to toe ! The water 
boiled. He broke for the fly and got it ! 
There remained enough sense in me to give 
him all he wanteql when he jumped not once 
but twenty times before the upstream flight 
that ran my line out to the last half-dozen 
turns, and I saw the nickled reel-bar glitter 
under the thinning green coils. My thumb 
was burned deep when I strove to stopper the 
line, but I did not feel it till later, for my soul 
was out in the dancing water praying for him 
to turn ere he took my tackle away. The 
prayer was heard. As I bowed back, the butt 
of the rod on my left hip-bone and the top 
joint dipping like unto a weeping willow, he 
turned, and I accepted each inch of slack that 
I could by any means get in as a favor from 
on High. There be several sorts of success 
in this world that taste well in the moment 
of enjoyment, but I question whether the 
stealthy theft of line from an able-bodied 
salmon who knows exactly what you are 
doing and why you are doing it is not sweeter 
than any other victory within human scope. 
Like California's fish, he ran at me head-on 
and leaped against the line, but the Lord 



96 American Notes 

gave me two hundred and fifty pairs of fingers 
in that hour. The banks and the pine trees 
danced dizzily round me, but I only reeled — 
reeled as for life — reeled for hours, and at 
the end of the reeling continued to give him 
the butt while he sulked in a pool. California 
was farther up the reach, and with the corner 
of my eye I could see him casting with long 
casts and much skill. Then he struck, and 
my fish broke for the weir at the same in- 
stant, and down the reach we came, Cali- 
fornia and I ; reel answering reel, even as the 
morning stars sung together. 

The first wild enthusiasm of capture had 
died away. We were both at work now in 
deadly earnest to prevent the lines fouling, to 
stall off a downstream rush for deep water 
just above the weir, and at the same time to 
get the fish into the shallow bay downstream 
that gave the best practicable landing. Port- 
land bade us both be of good heart, and vol- 
unteered to take the rod from my hands. 1 
would rather have died among the pebbles 
than surrender my right to play and land my 
first salmon, weight unknown, on an eight- 
ounce rod. I heard California, at my ear it 
seemed, gasping : " He's a fighter from Fight- 
ersville, sure ! " as his fish made a fresh break 
across the stream. I saw Portland fall off a 
log fence, break the overhanging bank, and 
clatter down to the pebbles, all sand and 
landing-net, and I dropped on a log to rest for 



American Notes 97 

a moment. As I drew breath the weary- 
hands slackened their hold, and I forgot to 
give him the butt. A wild scutter in the 
water, a plunge and a break for the head- 
waters of the Clackamas was my reward, and 
the hot toil of reeling-in with one eye under 
the water and the other on the top joint of 
the rod, was renewed. Worst of all, I was 
blocking California's path to the little landing- 
bay aforesaid, and he had to halt and tire his 
prize where he was. " The Father of all 
Salmon ! " he shouted. " For the love of 
Heaven, get your trout to bank, Johnny Bull." 
But I could no more. Even the insult failed 
to move me. The rest of the game was with 
the salmon. He suffered himself to be drawn, 
skipping with pretended delight at getting to 
the haven where I would fain have him. Yet 
no sooner did he feel shoal water under his 
ponderous belly than he backed like a tor- 
pedo-boat, and the snarl of the reel told me 
that my labor was in vain. A dozen times at 
least this happened ere the line hinted 
he had given up that battle and would 
be towed in. He was towed. The land- 
ing-net was useless for one of his size, and 
I would not have him gaffed. I stepped 
into the shallows and heaved him out with a 
respectful hand under the gill, for which kind- 
ness he battered me about the legs with his 
tail, and I felt the strength of him and was 
proud. California had taken my place in the 
7 



98 American Notes 

shallows, his fish hard held. I was up the 
bank lying full length on the sweet-scented 
grass, and gasping in company with my first 
salmon caught, played and landed on an eight- 
ounce rod. My hands were cut and bleeding. 
I was dripping with sweat, spangled like har- 
lequin with scales, w r et from the waist down, 
nose peeled by the sun, but utterly, supremely, 
and consummately happy. He, the beauty, 
the darling, the daisy, my Salmon Bahadur, 
weighed twelve pounds, and I had been seven 
and thirty minutes bringing him to bank! 
He had been lightly hooked on the angle of 
the right jaw, and the hook had not wearied 
him. That hour I sat among princes and 
crowned heads — greater than them all. Be- 
low the bank we heard California scuffling 
with his salmon, and swearing Spanish oaths. 
Portland and I assisted at the capture, and 
the fish dragged the spring-balance out by the 
roots. It was only constructed to weigh up to 
fifteen pounds. We stretched the three fish 
on the grass, — the eleven and a half, the 
twelve, and fifteen pounder, — and we swore 
an oath that all who came after should merely 
be weighed and put back again. 

How shall I tell the glories of that day so 
that you may be interested ? Again and 
again did California and I prance down that 
reach to the little bay, each with a salmon in 
tow, and land him in the shallows. Then 
Portland took my rod, and caught some ten- 



American Notes 99 

pounders, and my spoon was carried away by 
an unknown leviathan. Each fish, for the 
merits of the three that had died so gamely, 
was hastily hooked on the balance and flung 
back, Portland recording the weight in a 
pocket-book, for he was a real-estate man. 
Each fish fought for all he was worth, and none 
more savagely than the smallest — a game little 
six-pounder. At the end of six hours we 
added up the list. Total : 16 fish, aggregate 
weight 142 lbs. The score in detail runs 
something like this — it is only interesting to 
those concerned: 15, nj4, 12, 10,9^,8, 
and so forth ; as I have said, nothing under 
six pounds, and three ten-pounders. 

Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our 
rods — it was glory enough for all time — and 
returned weeping in each other's arms — weep- 
ing tears of pure joy — to that simple bare- 
legged family in the packing-case house by 
the waterside. 

The old farmer recollected days and nights 
of fierce warfare with the Indians — " way back 
in the Fifties," when every ripple of the 
Columbia River and her tributaries hid covert 
danger. God had dowered him with a queer 
crooked gift of expression, and a fierce anxiety 
for the welfare of his two little sons — tanned and 
reserved children who attended school daily, 
and spoke good English in a strange tongue. 

His wife was an austere woman who had 
once been kindly and perhaps handsome. | 

Lore. 



ioo American Notes 

Many years of toil had taken the elasticity 
out of step and voice. She looked for nothing 
better than everlasting work — the chafing de- 
tail of housework, and then a grave somewhere 
up the hill among the blackberries and the 
pines. But in her grim way she sympathized 
with her eldest daughter, a small and silent 
maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very 
far from the meals she tended or the pans she 
scoured. 

We stumbled into the household at a crisis ; 
and there was a deal of downright humanity in 
that same. A bad, wicked dressmaker had 
promised the maiden a dress in time for a to- 
morrow's railway journey, and, though the 
barefooted Georgie, who stood in very whole- 
some awe of his sister, had scoured the woods 
on a pony in search, that dress never arrived. 
So with sorrow in her heart, and a hundred 
Sister Anne glances up the road, she waited 
upon the strangers, and, I doubt not, cursed 
them for the wants that stood between her 
and her need for tears. It was a genuine little 
tragedy. The mother in a heavy, passionless 
voice rebuked her impatience, yet sat bowed 
over a heap of sewing for the daughter's 
benefit. 

These things I beheld in the long marigold- 
scented twilight and whispering night, loaf- 
ing round the little house with California, who 
unfolded himself like a lotus to the moon ; or 
in the little boarded bunk that was our bed- 



American Notes 101 

room, swapping tales with Portland and the 
old man. Most of the yarns began in this 
way: 

" Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of 
Lone County, Montana," or " There was a 
man riding the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting 
in a cactus," or " 'Bout the time of the San 
Diego land boom, a woman from Monterey," 
etc. 

You can try to piece out for yourselves what 
sort of stories they were. 

And next day California took me under 
his wing and told me we were going to see a 
city smitten by a boom, and catch trout. So 
we took a train and killed a cow — she 
wouldn't get out of the way, and the loco- 
motive " chanced " her and slew — and cross- 
ing into Washington Territory won the town 
of Tacoma, which stands at the head of Puget 
Sound upon the road to Alaska and Van- 
couver. 

California was right. Tacoma was literally 
staggering under a boom of the boomiest. I 
do not quite remember what her natural 
resources were supposed to be, though every 
second man shrieked a selection in my ear. 
They included coal and iron, carrots, potatoes, 
lumber, shipping, and a crop of thin news- 
papers all telling Portland that her days were 
numbered. California and I struck the place 
at twilight. The rude boarded pavements of 
the main streets rumbled under the heels of 



102 American Notes 

hundreds of furious men all actively engaged 
in hunting drinks and eligible corner-lots. 
They sought the drinks first. The street it- 
self alternated five-story business blocks of 
the later and more abominable forms of archi- 
tecture with board shanties. Overhead the 
drunken telegraph, telephone, and electric 
light wires tangled on the tottering posts 
whose butts were half-whittled through by the 
knife of the loafer. Down the muddy, grimy, 
unmetaled thoroughfare ran a horse-car line 
— the metals three inches above road level. 
Beyond this street rose many hills, and the 
town was thrown like a broken set of domi- 
noes over all. A steam tramway — it left the 
track the only time I used it — was nosing 
about the hills, but the most prominent fea- 
tures of the landscape were the foundations 
in brick and stone of a gigantic opera house 
and the blackened stumps of the pines. 
California sized up the town with one com- 
prehensive glance. " Big boom," said he ; 
and a few instants later : " About time to 
step off, I think," meaning thereby that the 
boom had risen to its limit, and it would be 
expedient not to meddle with it. We passed 
down ungraded streets that ended abruptly in 
a fifteen-foot drop and a nest of brambles ; 
along pavements that beginning in pine-plank 
ended in the living tree ; by hotels with Turk- 
ish mosque trinketry on their shameless tops, 
and the pine stumps at their very doors ; by 



American Notes 103 

a female seminary, tall, gaunt and red, which 
a native of the town bade us marvel at, and 
we marveled ; by houses built in imitation of 
the ones on Nob Hill, San Francisco, — after 
the Dutch fashion ; by other houses plente- 
ously befouled with jig-saw work, and others 
flaring with the castlemented, battlemented 
bosh of the wooden Gothic school. 

" You can tell just about when those fellers 
had their houses built," quoth California. 
" That one yonder wanted to be Ttalian, and 
his architect built him what he wanted. The 
new houses with the low straddle roofs and 
windows pitched in sideways and red brick 
walls are Dutch. That's the latest idea. I 
can read the history of the town." I had no 
occasion so to read. The natives were only 
too glad and too proud to tell me. The hotel 
walls bore a flaming panorama of Tacoma in 
which by the eye of faith I saw a faint resem- 
blance to the real town. The hotel stationary 
advertised that Tacoma bore on its face all 
the advantages of the highest civilization, and 
the newspapers sang the same tune in a 
louder key. The real-estate agents were sell- 
ing house-lots on unmade streets miles away 
for thousands of dollars. On the streets — the 
rude, crude streets, where the unshaded elec- 
tric light was fighting with the gentle northern 
twilight — men were babbling of money, town 
lots, and again money — how Alf or Ed had 
done such and such a thing that had brought 



104 American Notes 

him so much money ; and round the corner 
in a creaking boarded hall the red-jersey ed 
Salvationists were calling upon mankind to 
renounce all and follow their noisy God. The 
men dropped in by twos and threes, listened 
silently for a while, and as silently went their 
way, the cymbals clashing after them in vain. 
I think it was the raw, new smell of fresh 
sawdust everywhere pervading the air that 
threw upon me a desolating homesickness. 
It brought back in a moment all remem- 
brances of that terrible first night at school 
when the establishment has been newly white- 
washed, and a soft smell of escaping gas 
mingles with the odor of trunks and wet 
overcoats. I was a little boy, and the school 
was very new. A vagabond among collarless 
vagabonds, I loafed up the street, looking into 
the fronts of little shops where they sold slop 
shirts at fancy prices, which shops I saw later 
described in the papers as " great." Cali- 
fornia had gone off to investigate on his own 
account, and presently returned, laughing 
noiselessly. " They are all mad here," he 
said, " all mad. A man nearly pulled a gun 
on me because I didn't agree with him that 
Tacoma was going to whip San Francisco on 
the strength of carrots and potatoes. I asked 
him to tell me what the town produced, and I 
couldn't get anything out of him except those 
two darned vegetables. Say, what do you 
think?" 



American Notes 105 

I responded firmly, "I'm going into Brit- 
ish territory a little while — to draw breath." 

" I'm going up the Sound, too, for a while, " 
said he, " but I'm coming back — coming back 
to our salmon on the Clackamas. A man 
has been pressing me to buy real estate 
here. Young feller, don't you buy real 
estate here." 

California disappeared with a kindly wave 
of his overcoat into worlds other than mine, 
— good luck go with him, for he was a true 
sportsman ! — and I took a steamer up Puget 
Sound for Vancouver, which is the terminus 
of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That was a 
queer voyage. The water, landlocked among 
a thousand islands, lay still as oil under 
our bows, and the wake of the screw broke 
up the unquivering reflections of pines and 
cliffs a mile away. 'Twas as though we were 
trampling on glass. No one, not even the 
Government, knows the number of islands in 
the Sound. Even now you can get one 
almost for the asking; can build a house, 
raise sheep, catch salmon, and become a king 
on a small scale — your subjects the Indians 
of the reservation, who glide among the islets 
in their canoes and scratch their hides monkey- 
wise by the beach. A Sound Indian is un- 
lovely, -and only by accident picturesque. 
His wife drives the canoe, but he himself is 
so thorough a mariner that he can spring up 
in his cockle-craft and whack his wife over 



106 American Notes 

the head with a paddle without tipping the 
whole affair into the water. This I have seen 
him do unprovoked. I fancy it must have 
been to show off before the whites. 

Have I told you anything about Seattle — 
the town that was burned out a few weeks ago 
when the insurance men at San Francisco took 
their losses with a grin ? In the ghostly twi- 
light, just as the forest fires were beginning to 
glare from the unthrifty islands, we struck it 
— struck it heavily, for the wharves had all 
been burned down, and we tied up where we 
could, crashing into the rotten foundations of 
a boat house as a pig roots in high grass. 
The town, like Tacoma, was built upon a hill. 
In the heart of the business quarters there 
was a horrible black smudge, as though a 
Hand had come down and rubbed the place 
smooth. I know now what being wiped out 
means. The smudge seemed to be about a 
mile long, and its blackness was relieved by 
tents in which men were doing business with 
the wreck of the stock they had saved. 
There were shouts and counter-shouts from 
the steamer to the temporary wharf, which 
was laden with shingles for roofing, chairs, 
trunks, provision-boxes, and all the lath and 
string arrangements out of which a western 
town is made. This is the way the shouts 
ran : — 

" Oh, George ! What's the best with 
you?" 



American Notes 107 

" Nawthin'. Got the old safe out. She s 
burned to a crisp. Books all gone." 

"Save anythin' ?" 

" Bar'l o' crackers and my wife's bonnet. 
Goin' to start store on them though." 

" Bully for you. Where's that Emporium ? 
I'll drop in." 

" Corner what used to be Fourth and Main 
— little brown tent close to militia picquet. 
Sa-ay 1 We're under martial law, an' all the 
saloons are shut down." 

" Best for you, George. Some men gets 
crazy with a fire, an' liquor makes 'em crazier." 

" 'Spect any creator-condemned son of a 
female dog who has lost all his fixin's in a 
conflagration is going to put ice on his head 
an' run for Congress, do you ? How'd you 
like us act ? " 

The Job's comforter on the steamer retired 
into himself. 

" Oh, George " dived into the bar for a 
drink. 

P. S. — Among many curiosities I have un- 
earthed one. It was a Face on a steamer — a 
face above a pointed straw-colored beard, a 
face with thin lips and eloquent eyes. We 
conversed, and presently I got at the ideas of 
the Face. It was, though it lived for nine 
months of the year in the wilds of Alaska and 
British Columbia, an authority on the canon 
law of the Church of England — a zealous and 
bitter upholder of the supremacy of the afore* 



108 American Notes 

said Church. Into my amazed ears, as the 
steamer plodded through the reflections of the 
stars, it poured the battle-cry of the Church 
Militant here on earth, and put forward as a 
foul injustice that in the prisons of British 
Columbia the Protestant chaplain did not al- 
ways belong to the Church. The Face had 
no official connection with the august body, 
and by force of his life very seldom attended 
service. 

" But," said he, proudly, " I should think 
it direct disobedience to the orders of my 
Church rf I attended any other places of wor- 
ship than those prescribed. I was once for 
three months in a place where there was only 
a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, and I never set 
foot in it once, Sir. Never once. 'Twould 
have been heresy. Rank heresy." 

And as I leaned over the rail methought that 
all the little stars in the water were shaking 
with austere merriment ! But it may have 
been only the ripple of the steamer, after all. 



VII. 

u But who bhall chronicle the ways 
Of common folk, the nights and days 
Spent with rough goatherds on the snows, 
And travelers come whence no man knows ? " 

This day I know how a deserter feels. Here 
in Victoria, a hundred and forty miles out of 
America, the mail brings me news from our 
Home — the land of regrets. I was enjoying 
myself by the side of a trout-stream, and I feel 
inclined to apologize for every rejoicing breath 
I drew in the diamond clear air. The sick- 
ness, they said, is heavy with you ; from 
Rewari to the south good men are dying. 
Two names come in by the mail of two strong 
men dead — men that I dined and jested with 
only a little time ago, and it seems unfair that 
I should be here, cut off from the chain-gang 
and the shot-drill of our weary life. After all, 
there is no life like it that we lead over yon- 
der. Americans are Americans, and there 
are millions of them ; English are English ; 
but we of India are Us all the world over, 
knowing the mysteries of each other's lives 
and sorrowing for the death of a brother. 
How can I sit down and write to you of the 
mere joy of being alive ? The news has 
killed the pleasure of the day for me, and I 

109 



no American Notes 

am ashamed of myself. There are seventy 
brook trout lying in a creel, fresh drawn from 
Harrison Hot Springs, and they do not con- 
sole me. They are like the stolen apples that 
clinch the fact of a bad boy's playing truant. 
I would sell them all, with my heritage in the 
woods and air and the delight of meeting new 
and strange people, just to be back again in 
the old galling harness, the heat and the dust, 
the gatherings in the evenings by the flooded 
tennis-courts, the ghastly dull dinners at the 
Club when the very last woman has been 
packed off to the hills and the four or five sur- 
viving men ask the doctor the symptoms of 
incubating smallpox. I should be troubled in 
body, but at peace in the soul. O excellent 
and toil-worn public of mine — men of the 
brotherhood, griffins new joined from the 
February troopers, and gentlemen waiting for 
your off reckonings — take care of yourselves 
and keep well ! It hurts so when any die. 
There are so few of Us, and we know one 
another too intimately. 

Vancouver three years ago was swept off by 
fire in sixteen minutes, and only one house was 
left standing. To-day it has a population of 
fourteen thousand people, and builds its houses 
out of brick with dressed granite fronts. But 
a great sleepiness lies on Vancouver as com- 
pared with an American town ; men don't fly 



American Notes in 

up and down the streets telling lies, and the 
spittoons in the delightfully comfortable hotel 
are unused ; the baths are free and their doors 
are unlocked. You do not have to dig up the 
hotel clerk when you want to bathe, which 
shows the inferiority of Vancouver. An 
American bade me notice the absence of bustle, 
and was alarmed when in a loud and audible 
voice I thanked God for it. " Give me granite 
— hewn granite and peace," quoth I, " and 
keep your deal boards and bustle for* your- 
selves." 

The Canadian Pacific terminus is not a very 
gorgeous place as yet, but you can be shot 
directly from the window of the train into the 
liner that will take you in fourteen days from 
Vancouver to Yokohama. The Parthia, of 
some five thousand tons, was at her berth 
when I came, and the sight of the ex-Cunard 
on what seemed to be a little lake was curious. 
Except for certain currents which are not much 
mentioned, but which make the entrance 
rather unpleasant for sailing-boats, Vancouver 
possesses an almost perfect harbor. The 
town is built all round and about the harbor, 
and young as it is, its streets are better than 
those of western America. Moreover, the old 
flag waves over some of the buildings, and 
this is cheering to the soul. The place is full 
of Englishmen who speak the English tongue 
correctly and with clearness, avoiding more 
blasphemy than is necessary, and taking a 



ii2 American Notes 

respectable length of time to getting outside 
their drinks. These advantages and others 
that I have heard about, such as the construc- 
tion of elaborate workshops and the like by 
the Canadian Pacific in the near future, moved 
me to invest in real estate. He that sold it me 
was a delightful English Boy who, having tried 
for the Army and failed, had somehow mean- 
dered into a real-estate office, where he was 
doing well. I couldn't have bought it from an 
American. He would have overstated the 
case and proved me the possessor of the origi- 
nal Eden. All the Boy said was : " I give 
you my word it isn't on a cliff or under water, 
and before long the town ought to move out 
that way. I'd advise you to take it." And I 
took it as easily as a man buys a piece of 
tobacco. Me void, owner of some four hun- 
dred well-developed pines, a few thousand 
tons of granite scattered in blocks at the roots 
of the pines, and a sprinkling of earth. That's 
a town-lot. in Vancouver. You or your agent 
hold to it till property rises, then sell out and 
buy more land further out of town and repeat 
the process. I do not quite see how this sort 
of thing helps the growth of a town, but the 
English Boy says that it is the " essence of 
speculation," so it must be all right. But I 
wish there were fewer pines and rather less 
granite on my ground. Moved by curiosity 
and the lust of trout, I went seventy miles up 
the Canadian Pacific in one of the cross-Con- 



American Notes 113 

tinent cars, which are cleaner and less stuffy 
than the Pullman. A man who goes all the 
way across Canada is liable to be disappointed 
— not in the scenery, but in the progress of 
the country. So a batch of wandering politi- 
cians from England told me. They even 
went so far as to say that Eastern Canada was 
a failure and unprofitable. The place didn't 
move, they complained, and whole counties — 
they said provinces — lay under the rule of the 
Roman Catholic priests, who took care that 
the people should not be over-cumbered with 
the good things of this world to the detriment 
of their souls. My interest was in the line — 
the real and accomplished railway which is to 
throw actual fighting troops into the East some 
day when our hold of the Suez Canal is tem- 
porarily loosened. 

All that Vancouver wants is a fat earthwork 
forfupon a hill, — there are plenty of hills to 
choose from, — a selection of big guns, a couple 
of regiments of infantry, and later on a big 
arsenal. The raw self-consciousness of Amer- 
ica would be sure to make her think these 
arrangements intended for her benefit, but she 
could be enlightened. It is not seemly to 
leave unprotected the head-end of a big rail- 
way ; for though Victoria and Esquimalt, our 
naval stations on Vancouver Island, are very 
near, so also is a place called Vladivostok, and 
though Vancouver Narrows are strait, they 
allow room enough for a man-of-war. The 
8 



H4 American Notes 

people — I did not speak to more than two 
hundred of them — do not know about Russia 
or military arrangements. They are trying to 
open trade with Japan in lumber, and are 
raising fruit, wheat, and sometimes minerals. 
All of them agree that we do not yet know the 
resources of British Columbia, and all joyfully 
bade me note the climate, which was distinctly 
warm. " We never have killing cold here. 
It's the most perfect climate in the world." 
Then there are three perfect climates, for 
I have tasted 'em — California, Washington 
Territory, and British Columbia. I cannot say 
which is the loveliest. 

When I left by steamer and struck across 
the Sound to our naval station at Victoria, 
Vancouver Island, I found in that quite English 
town of beautiful streets quite a colony of old 
men doing nothing but talking, fishing, and loaf- 
ing at the Club. That means that the retired go 
to Victoria. On a thousand a year pension a 
man would be a millionaire in these parts, and 
for four hundred he could live well. It was at 
Victoria they told me the tale of the fire in 
Vancouver. How the inhabitants of New 
Westminster, twelve miles from Vancouver, saw 
a glare in the sky at six in the evening but 
thought it was a forest fire ; how later bits of 
burnt paper flew about their streets, and they 
guessed that evil had happened ; how an hour 
later a man rode into the city crying that 
there was no Vancouver left. All had been 



American Notes 115 

wiped out by the flames in sixteen minutes. 
How, two hours later, the Mayor of New West- 
minster having voted nine thousand dollars 
from the Municipal funds, relief-wagons with 
food and blankets were pouring into where 
Vancouver stood. How fourteen people were 
supposed to have died in the fire, but how 
even now when they laid new foundations the 
workmen unearthed charred skeletons, many 
more than fourteen. " That night," said the 
teller, " all Vancouver was houseless. The 
wooden town had gone in a breath. Next 
day they began to build in brick, and you have 
seen what they have achieved." 

The sight afar off of three British men-of- 
war and a torpedo-boat consoled me as I re- 
turned from Victoria to Tacoma and discovered 
en route that I was surfeited with scenery. 
There is a great deal in the remark of a dis- 
contented traveler : " When you have seen a 
fine forest, a bluff, a river, and a lake you have 
seen all the scenery of western America. 
Sometimes the pine is three hundred feet high, 
and sometimes the rock is, and sometimes the 
lake is a hundred miles long. But it's all the 
same, don't you know. I'm getting sick of 
it." I dare not say getting sick. I'm only 
tired. If Providence could distribute all this 
beauty in little bits where people most wanted 
it — among you in India, — it would be well. 
But it is en masse, overwhelming, with nobody 
but the tobacco-chewing captain of a river 



n6 American Notes 

steamboat to look at it. Men said if I went 
to Alaska I should see islands even more 
wooded, snow-peaks loftier, and rivers more 
lovely than those around me. That decided 
me not to go to Alaska. I went east — east to 
Montana, after another horrible night in Ta- 
coma among the men who spat. Why does 
the Westerner spit ? It can't amuse him, and 
it doesn't interest his neighbor. 

But I am beginning to mistrust. Every- 
thing good as well as everything bad is sup- 
posed to come from the East. Is there a 
shooting-scrape between prominent citizens ? 
Oh, you'll find nothing of that kind in the 
East. Is there a more than usually revolting 
lynching ? They don't do that in the East. 
I shall find out when I get there whether this 
unnatural perfection be real. 

Eastward then to Montana I took my way 
for the Yellowstone National Park, called in 
the guide-books " Wonderland." But the real 
Wonderland began in the train. We were a 
merry crew. One gentleman announced his 
intention of paying no fare and grappled the 
conductor, who neatly cross-buttocked him 
through a double plate-glass window. His 
head was cut open in four or five places. A 
doctor on the train hastily stitched up the 
biggest gash, and he was dropped at a way- 
side station, spurting blood at every hair — a 
scarlet-headed and ghastly sight. The con- 
ductor guessed that he would die, and volun- 



American Notes 117 

teered the information that there was no profit 
in monkeying with the North Pacific Railway. 

Night was falling as we cleared the forests 
and sailed out upon a wilderness of sage brush. 
The desolations of Montgomery, the wilderness 
of Sind, the hummock-studded desert of Bika- 
neer, are joyous and homelike compared to the 
impoverished misery of the sage. It is blue, it 
is stunted, it is dusty. It wraps the rolling hills 
as a mildewed shroud wraps the body of a 
long-dead man. It makes you weep for sheer 
loneliness, and there is no getting away from 
it. When Childe Roland came to the dark 
Tower he traversed the sage brush. 

Yet there is one thing worse than sage un- 
adulterated, and that is a prairie city. We 
stopped at Pasco Junction, and a man told me 
that it was the Queen City of the Prairie. I 
wish Americans didn't tell such useless lies. I 
counted fourteen or fifteen frame-houses, and 
a portion of a road that showed like a bruise 
on the untouched surface of the blue sage, 
running away and away up to the setting sun. 
The sailor sleeps with a half-inch plank be- 
tween himself and death. He is at home be- 
side the handful of people who curl themselves 
up o' nights with nothing but a frail scantling, 
almost as thin as a blanket, to shut out the 
unmeasurable loneliness of the sage. 

When the train stopped on the road, as it 
did once or twice, the solid silence of the sage 
got up and shouted at us. It was like a 



n8 American Notes 

nightmare, and one not in the least improved 
by having to sleep in an emigrant-car ; the 
regularly ordained sleepers being full. There 
was a row in our car toward morning, a man 
having managed to get querulously drunk in 
the night. Up rose a Cornishman with a red 
head full of strategy, and strapped the obstre- 
perous one, smiling largely as he did so, and 
a delicate little woman in a far bunk watched 
the fray and called the drunken man a 
" damned hog," which he certainly was, 
though she needn't have put it quite so 
coarsely. Emigrant cars are clean, but the 
accommodation is as hard as a plank bed. 

Later we laid our bones down to crossing 
the Rockies. An American train can climb 
up the side of a house if need be, but it is not 
pleasant to sit in it. We clomb till we struck 
violent cold and an Indian reservation, and 
the noble savage came to look at us. He was 
a Flathead and unlovely. Most Americans 
are charmingly frank about the Indian. " Let 
us get rid of him as soon as possible, " they 
say. " We have no use for him." Some of 
the men I meet have a notion that we in India 
are exterminating the native in the same 
fashion, and I have been asked to fix a date 
for the final extinguishment of the Aryan. 
I answer that it will be a long business. 
Very many Americans have an offensive habit 
of referring to natives as " heathen." Ma- 
hometans and Hindus are heathen alike in 



American Notes 119 

their eyes, and they vary the epithet with 
" pagan " and " idolater." But this is beside 
the matter, which is the Stampede Tunnel — ■ 
our actual point of crossing the Rockies. 
Thank Heaven, I need never take that tunnel 
again ! It is about two miles long, and in 
effect is nothing more than the gallery of a 
mine shored with timber and lighted with 
electric lamps. Black darkness would be pref- 
erable, for the lamps just reveal the rough 
cutting of the rocks, and that is very rough in- 
deed. The train crawls through, brakes down, 
and you can hear the water and little bits of 
stone falling on the roof of the car. Then 
you pray, pray fervently, and the air gets 
stiller and stiller, and you dare not take your 
unwilling eyes off the timber shoring, lest a 
prop should fall, for lack of your moral sup- 
port. Before the tunnel was built you crossed 
in the open air by a switch-back line. A 
watchman goes through the tunnel after each 
train, but that is no protection. He just 
guesses that another train will pull through, 
and the engine-driver guesses the same thing. 
Some day between the two of them there will 
be a cave in the tunnel. Then the enterpris- 
ing reporter will talk about the shrieks and 
groans of the buried and the heroic efforts of 
the Press in securing first information, and — ■ 
that will be all. Human life is of small ac- 
count out here. 

I was listening to yarns in the smoking- 



120 American Notes 

compartment of the Pullman, all the way to 
Helena, and with very few exceptions, each 
had for its point, violent, brutal, and ruffianly 
murder — murder by fraud and the craft of the 
savage — murder unavenged by the law, or at 
the most by an outbreak of fresh lawlessness. 
At the end of each tale I was assured that the 
old days had passed away, and that these 
were anecdotes of five years' standing. One 
man in particular distinguished himself by 
holding up to admiration the exploits of some 
cowboys of his acquaintance, and their skill in 
the use of the revolver. Each tale of horror 
wound up with " and that's the sort of man he 
was," as who should say : " Go and do like- 
wise." Remember that the shootings, the 
cuttings, and the stabbings were not the out- 
come of any species of legitimate warfare ; the 
heroes were not forced to fight for their lives. 
Far from it. The brawls were bred by liquor 
in which they assisted — in saloons and gam- 
bling-hells they were wont to " pull their guns " 
on a man, and in the vast majority of cases 
without provocation. The tales sickened me, 
but taught one thing. A man who carries a 
pistol may be put down as a coward — a person 
to be shut out from every decent mess and 
club, and gathering of civilized folk. There 
is neither chivalry nor romance in the weapon, 
for all that American authors have seen fit to 
write. I would I could make you understand 
the full measure of contempt with which cer- 



American Notes 121 

tain aspects of Western life have inspired me. 
Let us try a comparison. Sometimes it hap- 
pens that a young, a very young, man, whose 
first dress-coat is yet glossy, gets slightly 
flushed at a dinner-party among his seniors. 
After the ladies are gone, he begins to talk. 
He talks, you will remember, as a " man of 
the world " and a person of varied experiences, 
an authority on all things human and divine. 
The gray heads of the elders bow assentingly 
to his wildest statement ; some one tries to 
turn the conversation when what the youngster 
conceives to be wit has offended a sensibility ; 
and another deftly slides the decanters beyond 
him as they circle round the table. You know 
the feeling of discomfort — pity mingled with 
aversion — over the boy who is making an 
exhibition of himself. The same emotion 
came back to me, when an old man who ought 
to have known better appealed from time to 
time for admiration of his pitiful sentiments. 
It was right in his mind to insult, to maim, and 
to kill ; right to evade the law where it was 
strong and to trample over it where it was 
weak ; right to swindle in politics, to lie in 
affairs of State, and commit perjury in matters 
of municipal administration. The car was 
full of little children, utterly regardless of their 
parents, fretful, peevish, spoilt beyond any- 
thing I have ever seen in Anglo-India. They 
in time would grow up into men such as sat in 
the smoker, and had no regard for the law ; 



122 American Notes 

men who would conduct papers siding " with 
defiance of any and every law." But it's of 
no consequence, as Mr. Toots says. 

During the descent of the Rockies we jour- 
neyed for a season on a trestle only two hun- 
dred and eighty-six feet high. It was made of 
iron, but up till two years ago a wooden struc- 
ture bore up the train, and was used long after 
it had been condemned by the civil engineers. 
Some day the iron one will come down, just 
as Stampede Tunnel will, and the results will 
be even more startling. 

Late in the night we ran over a skunk — 
ran over it in the dark. Everything that has 
been said about the skunk is true. It is an 
Awesome Stink. 



American Notes 123 



VIII. 

Livingstone is a town of two thousand 
people, and the junction for the little side-line 
that takes you to the Yellowstone National 
Park. It lies in a fold of the prairie, and be- 
hind it is the Yellowstone River and the gate 
of the mountains through which the river 
flows. There is one street in the town, where 
the cowboy's pony and the little foal of the 
brood-mare in the buggy rest contentedly in 
the blinding sunshine while the cowboy gets 
himself shaved at the only other barber's shop, 
and swaps lies at the bar. I exhausted the 
town, including the saloons, in ten minutes, 
and got away on the rolling grass downs where 
I threw myself to rest. Directly under the 
hill I was on, swept a drove of horses in charge 
of two mounted men. That was a picture I 
shall not soon forget. A light haze of dust 
went up from the hoof-trodden green, scarcely 
veiling the unfettered deviltries of three hun- 
dred horses who very much wanted to stop 
and graze. " Yow ! Yow ! Yow ! " yapped 
the mounted men in chorus like coyotes. The 
column moved forward at a trot, divided as it 
met a hillock and scattered into fan shape all 
among the suburbs of Livingstone. I heard 
the " snick " of a stock whip, half a dozen 



124 American Notes 

" Yow, yows," and the mob had come together 
again, and, with neighing and wickering and 
squealing and a great deal of kicking on the 
part of the youngsters, rolled like a wave of 
brown water toward the uplands. 

I was within twenty feet of the leader, a 
gray stallion — lord of many brood-mares 
all deeply concerned for the welfare of their 
fuzzy foals. A cream-colored beast — I knew 
him at once for the bad character of the 
troop — broke back, taking with him some 
frivolous fillies. I heard the snick of the 
whips somewhere in the dust, and the fillies 
came back at a canter, very shocked and in- 
dignant. On the heels of the last rode both 
the stockmen — picturesque ruffians who 
wanted to know " what in hell " I was doing 
there, waved their hats, and swept down the 
slope after their charges. When the noise of 
the troop had died there came a wonderful 
silence on all the prairie — that silence, they 
say, which enters into the heart of the old- 
time hunter and trapper and marks him off 
from the rest of his race. The town disap- 
peared in the darkness, and a very young 
moon showed herself over a bald-headed, 
snow-flecked peak. Then the Yellowstone, 
hidden by the water-willows, lifted up its voice 
and sang a little song to the mountains, and 
an old horse that had crept up in the dusk 
breathed inquiringly on the back of my neck. 
When I reached the hotel I found all manner 



American Notes 125 

of preparation under way for the 4th of July, 
and a drunken man with a Winchester rifle 
over his shoulder patrolling the sidewalk. I 
do not think he wanted any one. He carried 
the gun as other folk carry walking-sticks. 
None the less I avoided the direct line of fire 
and listened to the blasphemies of miners and 
stockmen till far into the night. In every 
bar-room lay a copy of the local paper, and 
every copy impressed it upon the inhabitants 
of Livingstone that they were the best, finest, 
bravest, richest, and most progressive town of 
the most progressive nation under Heaven ; 
even as the Tacoma and Portland papers had 
belauded their readers. And yet, all my pur- 
blind eyes could see was a grubby little hamlet 
full of men without clean collars and perfectly 
unable to get through one sentence unadorned 
by three oaths. They raise horses and min- 
erals round and about Livingstone, but they 
behave as though they raised cherubims with 
diamonds in their wings. 

From Livingstone the National Park train 
follows the Yellowstone River through the 
gate of the mountains and over arid volcanic 
country. A stranger in the cars saw me look 
at the ideal trout-stream below the windows 
and murmured softly : " Lie off at Yankee 
Jim's if you want good fishing." They halted 
the train at the head of a narrow valley, and I 
leaped literally into the arms of Yankee Jim, 
sole owner of a log hut and an indefinite 



126 American Notes 

amount of hay-ground, and constructor of 
twenty-seven miles of wagon-road over which 
he held toll right. There was the hut — the 
river fifty yards away, and the polished line of 
metals that disappeared round a bluff. That 
was all. The railway added the finishing 
touch to the already complete loneliness of 
the place. Yankee Jim was a picturesque old 
man with a talent for yarns that Annanias 
might have envied. It seemed to me, pre- 
sumptuous in my ignorance, that I might 
hold my own with the old-timer if I judi- 
ciously painted up a few lies gathered in the 
course of my wanderings. Yankee Jim saw 
every one of my tales and went fifty better on 
the spot. He dealt in bears and Indians — 
never less than twenty of each ; had known 
the Yellowstone country for years, and bore 
upon his body marks of Indian arrows ; and 
his eyes had seen a squaw of the Crow 
Indians burned alive at the stake. He said 
she screamed considerable. In one point did 
he speak the truth — as regarded the merits of 
that particular reach of the Yellowstone. He 
said it was alive with trout. It was. I fished 
it from noon till twilight, and the fish bit at 
the brown hook as though never a fat trout- 
fly had fallen on the water. From pebbly 
reaches, quivering in the heat-haze where the 
foot caught on stumps cut four-square by 
the chisel-tooth of the beaver ; past the fringe 
of the water-willow crowded with the breeding 



American Notes 127 

trout-fly and alive with toads and water- 
snakes ; over the drifted timber to the grate- 
ful shadow of big trees that darkened the 
holes where the fattest fish lay, I worked for 
seven hours. The mountain flanks on either 
side of the valley gave back the heat as the 
desert gives it, and the dry sand by the rail- 
way track, where I found a rattlesnake, was 
hot-iron to the touch. But the trout did not 
care for the heat. They breasted the boiling 
river for my fly and they got it. I simply 
dare not give my bag. At the fortieth trout 
I gave up counting, and I had reached the 
fortieth in less than two hours. They were 
small fish, — not one over two pounds, — but 
they fought like small tigers, and I lost three 
flies before I could understand their methods 
of escape. Ye gods ! That was fishing, 
though it peeled the skin from my nose in 
strips. 

At twilight Yankee Jim bore me off, pro- 
testing, to supper in the hut. The fish had 
prepared me for any surprise, wherefore when 
Yankee Jim introduced me to a young woman 
of five-and-twenty, with eyes like the deep- 
fringed eyes of the gazelle, and " on the neck 
the small head buoyant, like a bell-flower in 
its bed," I said nothing. It was all in the 
day's events. She was California-raised, the 
wife of a man who owned a stock-farm " up 
the river a little ways," and, with her husband, 
tenant of Yankee Jim's shanty. I know she 



128 American Notes 

wore list slippers, and did not wear stays ; 
but I know also that she was beautiful by any 
standard of beauty, and that the trout she 
cooked were fit for a king's supper. And 
after supper strange men loafed up in the dim 
delicious twilight, with the little news of the 
day — how a heifer had " gone strayed " from 
Nicholson's ; how the widow at Grant's Fork 
wouldn't part with a little hayland nohow, 
though " she an' her big brothers can't man- 
age more than ha-af of their land now. She's 
so darned proud." Diana of the Crossways 
entertained them in queenly wise, and her 
husband and Yankee Jim bade them sit right 
down and make themselves at home. Then did 
Yankee Jim uncurl his choicest lies on Indian 
warfare aforetime ; then did the whisky-flask 
circle round the little crowd ; then did Diana's 
husband 'low that he was quite handy with the 
lariat, but had seen men rope a steer by any 
foot or horn indicated ; then did Diana un- 
burden herself about her neighbors. The 
nearest house was three miles away, " but the 
women aren't nice, neighborly folk. They 
talk so. They haven't got anything else to 
do, seemingly. If a woman goes to a dance 
and has a good time, they talk, and if she 
wears a silk dress, they want to know how 
jest ranchin' folks — folk on a ranche — come 
by such things ; and they make mischief 
down all the lands here from Gardiner City 
way back up to Livingstone. They're mostly 



American Notes 129 

Montana raised, and they haven't been no 
wheres. Ah, how they talk! " "Were things 
like this," demanded Diana, " in the big world 
outside, whence I had come ? " " Yes," I 
said, " things were very much the same all 
over the world," and I thought of a far-away 
station in India, where new dresses and the 
having of good times at dances raised cackle 
more grammatical perhaps, but no less veno- 
mous than the gossip of the " Montana-raised " 
folk on the ranches of the Yellowstone. 

Next morn I fished again and listened to 
Diana telling the story of her life. I forget 
what she told me, but I am distinctly aware 
that she had royal eyes and a mouth that the 
daughter of a hundred earls might have envied 
— so small and so delicately cut it was. " An' 
you come back an' see us again," said the 
simple-minded folk. " Come back an' we'll 
show you how to catch six-pound trout at the 
head of the canon." 

To-day I am in the Yellowstone Park, and I 
wish I were dead. The train halted at Cin- 
nabar station, and we were decanted, a howl- 
ing crowd of us, into stages, variously horsed, 
for the eight-mile drive to the first spectacle of 
the Park — a place called the Mammoth Hot 
Springs. " What means this eager, anxious 
throng ? " I asked the driver. " You've struck 
one of Rayment's excursion parties — that's 
all — a crowd of creator-condemned fools 
mostly. Aren't you one of 'em ? " " No," I 
9 



130 American Notes 

said. " May I sit up here with you, great chief 
and man with a golden tongue ? I do not 
know Mister Rayment. I belong to T. Cook 
and Son." The other person, from the quality 
of the material he handles, must be the son 
of a sea-cook. He collects masses of Down- 
Easters from the New England States and 
elsewhere and hurls them across the Continent 
and into the Yellowstone Park on tour. A 
brake-load of Cook's Continental tourists tra- 
pezing through Paris (I've seen 'em) are angels 
of light compared to the Rayment trippers. 
It is not the ghastly vulgarity, the oozing, 
rampant Bessemer-steel self-sufficiency and 
ignorance of the men that revolts me, so much 
as the display of these same qualities in the 
women-folk. I saw a new type in the coach, 
and all my dreams of a better and more per- 
fect East died away. " Are these — um — per- 
sons here any sort of persons in their own 
places ? " I asked a shepherd who appeared 
to be herding them. 

" Why, certainly. They include very many 
prominent and representative citizens from 
seven States of the Union, and most of them 
are wealthy. Yes, sir. Representative and 
prominent." 

We ran across bare hills on an unmetaled 
road under a burning sun in front of a volley 
of playful repartee from the prominent citizens 
inside. It was the 4th of July. The horses 
had American flags in their headstalls, some 



American Notes 131 

of the women wore flags and colored hand- 
kerchiefs in their belts, and a young German 
on the box-seat with me was bewailing the loss 
of a box of crackers. He said he had been 
sent to the Continent to get his schooling and so 
had lost his American accent; but no Conti- 
nental schooling writes German Jew all over a 
man's face and nose. He was a rabid American 
citizen — one of a very difficult class to deal 
with. As a general rule, praise unsparingly, 
and without discrimination. That keeps most 
men quiet ; but some, if you fail to keep up a 
continuous stream of praise, proceed to revile 
the Old Country — Germans and Irish who 
are more Americans than the Americans are 
the chief offenders. This young American 
began to attack the English army. He had 
seen some of it on parade and he pitied the 
men in bearskins as " slaves." The citizen, 
by the way, has a contempt for his own army 
which exceeds anything you meet among the 
most illiberal classes in England. I admitted 
that our army was very poor, had done noth- 
ing, and had been nowhere. This exasper- 
ated him, for he expected an argument, and 
he trampled on the British Lion generally. 
Failing to move me, he vowed that I had no 
patriotism like his own. I said I had not, and 
further ventured that very few Englishmen 
had ; which, when you come to think of it, is 
quite true. By the time he had proved con- 
clusively that before the Prince of Wales came 



J32 American Notes 

to the throne we should be a blethering re- 
public, we struck a road that overhung a river, 
and my interest in " politics " was lost in ad- 
miration of the driver's skill as he sent his 
four big horses along that winding road. 
There was no room for any sort of accident — 
a shy or a swerve would have dropped us 
sixty feet into the roaring Gardiner River. 
Some of the persons in the coach remarked 
that the scenery was " elegant." Wherefore, 
even at the risk of my own life, I did urgently 
desire an accident and the massacre of some 
of the more prominent citizens. What " ele- 
gance " lies in a thousand-foot pile of honey- 
colored rock, riven into peak and battlement, 
the highest peak defiantly crowned by an 
eagle's nest, the eaglet peering into the gulf 
and screaming for his food, I could not for 
the life of me understand. But they speak a 
strange tongue. 

En route we passed other carriages full of 
trippers, who had done their appointed five 
days in the Park, and yelped at us fraternally 
as they disappeared in clouds of red dust. 
When we struck the Mammoth Hot Spring 
Hotel — a huge yellow barn — a sign-board in- 
formed us that the altitude was six thousand 
two hundred feet. The Park is just a howling 
wilderness of three thousand square miles, 
full of all imaginable freaks of a fiery nature. 
An hotel company, assisted by the Secretary 
of State for the Interior, appears to control it; 



American Notes 133 

there are hotels at all the points of interest, 
guide-books, stalls for the sale of minerals, and 
so forth, after the model of Swiss summer 
places. 

The tourists — may their master die an evil 
death at the hand of a mad locomotive ! — 
poured into that place with a joyful whoop, 
and, scarce washing the dust from themselves, 
began to celebrate the 4th of July. They 
called it " patriotic exercises " ; elected a 
clergyman of their own faith as president, and, 
sitting on the landing of the first floor, began 
to make speeches and read the Declaration of 
Independence. The clergyman rose up and 
told them they were the greatest, freest, sub- 
limest, most chivalrous, and richest people on 
the face of the earth, and they all said Amen. 
Another clergyman asserted in the words of 
the Declaration that all men were created 
equal, and equally entitled to Life, Liberty, 
and the pursuit of Happiness. I should like 
to know whether the wild and woolly West 
recognizes this first right as freely as the 
grantors intended. The clergyman then bade 
the world note that the tourists included rep- 
resentatives of seven of the New England 
States ; whereat I felt deeply sorry for the 
New England States in their latter days. He 
opined that this running to and fro upon the 
earth, under the auspices of the excellent 
Rayment, would draw America more closely 
together, especially when the Westerners re- 



134 American Notes 

membered the perils that they of the East had 
surmounted by rail and river. At duly ap- 
pointed intervals the congregation sang " My 
country, 'tis of thee " to the tune of " God 
save the Queen " (here they did not stand up), 
and the " Star-Spangled Banner " (here they 
did), winding up the exercise with some dog- 
grel of their own composition to the tune of 
" John Brown's body," movingly setting forth 
the perils before alluded to. They then ad- 
journed to the verandas and watched fire- 
crackers of the feeblest, exploding one by one, 
for several hours. 

What amazed me was the calm with which 
these folks gathered together and commenced 
to belaud their noble selves, their country, 
and their " institootions " and everything else 
that was theirs. The language was, to these 
bewildered ears, wild advertisement, gas, 
bunkum, blow, anything you please beyond 
the bounds of common sense. An archangel, 
selling town-lots on the Glassy Sea, would 
have blushed to the tips of his wings to de- 
scribe his property in similar terms. Then 
they gathered round the pastor and told him 
his little sermon was " perfectly glorious," 
really grand, sublime, and so forth, and he 
bridled ecclesiastically. At the end a per- 
fectly unknown man attacked me and asked 
me what I thought of American patriotism. I 
said there was nothing like it in the Old 
Country. By the way, always tell an Ameri- 
can this. It soothes him. 



American Notes 135 

Then said he : " Are you going to get out 
your letters — your letters of naturalization ? " 

"Why?" I asked. 

" I presoom you do business in this coun- 
try, and make money out of it, — and it seems 
to me that it would be your dooty." 

" Sir," said I, sweetly, " there is a forgot- 
ten little isle across the seas called England. 
It is not much bigger than the Yellowstone 
Park. In that island a man of your country 
could work, marry, make his fortune or 
twenty fortunes, and die. Throughout his 
career not one soul would ask him whether 
he were a British subject or a child of the 
Devil. Do you understand ? " 

I think he did, because he said something 
about " Britishers " which wasn't compli- 
mentary. 



136 American Notes 



IX. 

" That desolate land and lone 
Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone 
Roar down their mountain path." 

Twice have I written this letter from end 
to end. Twice have I torn it up, fearing lest 
those across the water should say that I had 
gone mad on a sudden. Now we will begin 
for the third time quite solemnly and soberly. 
I have been through the Yellowstone National 
Park in a buggy, in the company of an ad- 
venturous old lady from Chicago and her 
husband, who disapproved of scenery as being 
" ongodly." I fancy it scared them. 

We began, as you know, with the Mam- 
moth Hot Springs. They are only a gigantic 
edition of those pink and white terraces not 
long ago destroyed by earthquake in New 
Zealand. At one end of the little valley in 
which the hotel stands the lime-laden springs 
that break from the pine-covered hillsides 
have formed a frozen cataract of white, lemon, 
and palest pink formation, through and over 
and in which water of the warmest bubbles 
and drips and trickles from pale-green lagoon 
to exquisitely fretted basin. The ground 
rings hollow as a kerosene-tin, and some day 
the Mammoth Hotel, guests and all, will sink 



American Notes 137 

into the caverns below and be turned into a 
stalactite. When I set foot on the first of 
the terraces, a tourist-trampled ramp of scabby- 
gray stuff, I met a stream of iron-red hot 
water which ducked into a hole like a rabbit. 
Followed a gentle chuckle of laughter, and 
then a deep, exhausted sigh from nowhere in 
particular. Fifty feet above my head a jet of 
stream rose up and died out in the blue. It was 
worse than the boiling mountain at Myano- 
shita. The dirty white deposit gave place to 
lime whiter than snow ; and I found a basin 
which some learned hotel-keeper has christ- 
ened Cleopatra's pitcher, or Mark Antony's 
whisky-jug, or something equally poetical. 
It was made of frosted silver ; it was filled 
with water as clear as the sky. I do not 
know the depth of that wonder. The eye 
looked = down beyond grottoes and caves of 
beryl into an abyss that communicated directly 
with the central fires of earth. And the pool 
was in pain, so that it could not refrain from 
talking about it ; muttering and chattering 
and moaning. From the lips of the lime- 
ledges, forty feet under water, spurts of silver 
bubbles would fly up and break the peace of 
the crystal atop. Then the whole pool would 
shake and grow dim, and there were noises. 
I removed myself only to find other pools 
all equally unhappy, rifts in the ground, full 
of running, red-hot water, slippery sheets of 
deposit overlaid with greenish gray hot water, 



138 American Notes 

and here and there pit-holes dry as a rifled 
tomb in India, dusty and waterless. Else- 
where the infernal waters had first boiled dead 
and then embalmed the pines and under- 
wood, or the forest trees had taken heart and 
smothered up a blind formation with green- 
ery, so that it was only by scraping the earth 
you could tell what fires had raged beneath. 
Yet the pines will win the battle in years to 
come, because Nature, who first forges all 
her work in her great smithies, has nearly 
finished this job, and is ready to temper it in 
the soft brown earth. The fires are dying 
down ; the hotel is built where terraces have 
overflowed into flat wastes of deposits ; the 
pines have taken possession of the high 
ground whence the terraces first started. 
Only the actual curve of the cataract stands 
clear, and it is guarded by soldiers who patrol 
it with loaded six-shooters, in order that the 
tourist may not bring up fence-rails and sink 
them in a pool, or chip the fretted tracery of 
the formations with a geological hammer, or, 
walking where the crust is too thin, foolishly 
cook himself. 

I maneuvered round those soldiers. They 
were cavalry in a very slovenly uniform, dark- 
blue blouse, and light-blue trousers unstrapped, 
cut spoon-shape over the boot; cartridge 
belt, revolver, peaked cap, and worsted gloves 
— black buttons ! By the mercy of Allah I 
opened conversation with a spectacled Scot 



American Notes 139 

He had served the Queen in the Marines and 
a Line regiment, and the " go-fever " being in 
his bones, had drifted to America, there to 
serve Uncle Sam. We sat on the edge of an 
extinct little pool, that under happier circum- 
stances would have grown into a geyser, and 
began to discuss things generally. To us 
appeared yet another soldier. No need to ask 
his nationality or to be told that the troop 
called him " The Henglishman." A cockney 
was he, who had seen something of warfare in 
Egypt, and had taken his discharge from a 
Fusilier regiment not unknown to you. 

" And how do things go ? " 

" Very much as you please," said they. 
" There's not half the discipline here that 
there is in the Queen's service — not half — nor 
the work either, but what there is, is rough 
work. Why, there's a sergeant now with a 
black eye that one of our men gave him. 
They won't say anything about that, of course. 
Our punishments ? Fines mostly, and then if 
you carry on too much you go to the cooler — 
that's the clink. Yes, Sir. Horses ? Oh, 
they're devils, these Montana horses. Bron- 
chos mostly. We don't slick 'em up for 
parade — not much. And the amount of 
schooling that you put into one English troop- 
horse would be enough for a whole squadron 
of these creatures. You'll meet more troopers 
further up the Park. Go and look at their 
horses and their turnouts. I fancy it'll startle 



140 American Notes 

you. I'm wearing a made tie and a breastpin 
under my blouse ? Of course I am ! I can 
wear anything I darn please. We aren't par- 
ticular here. I shouldn't dare come on parade 
— no, nor yet fatigue duty — in this condition 
in the Old Country ; but it don't matter here. 
But don't you forget, Sir, that it's taught me 
how to trust to myself, and my shooting irons. 
I don't want fifty orders to move me across 
the Park, and catch a poacher. Yes, they 
poach here. Men come in with an outfit and 
ponies, smuggle in a gun or two, and shoot 
the bison. If you interfere, they shoot at 
you. Then you confiscate all their outfit and 
their ponies. We have a pound full of them 
now down below. There's our Captain over 
yonder. Speak to him if you want to know 
anything special. This service isn't a patch 
on the Old Country's service ; but you look, if 
it was worked up it would be just a Hell of a 
service. But these citizens despise us, and 
they put us on to road-mending, and such like. 
'Nough to ruin any army." 

To the Captain I addressed myself after my 
friends had gone. They told me that a good 
many American officers dressed by the French 
army. The Captain certainly might have been 
mistaken for a French officer of light cavalry, 
and he had more than the courtesy of a 
Frenchman. Yes, he had read a good deal 
about our Indian border warfare, and had 
been much struck with the likeness it bore to 



American Notes 141 

Red Indian warfare. I had better, when I 
reached the next cavalry post, scattered be- 
tween two big geyser basins, introduce myself to 
a Captain and Lieutenant. They could show 
me things. He himself was devoting all his 
time to conserving the terraces, and surrep- 
titiously running hot water into dried-up basins 
that fresh pools might form. " I get very in- 
terested in that sort of thing. It's not duty, 
but it's what I'm put here for." And then he 
began to talk of his troop as I have heard his 
brethren in India talk. Such a troop ! Built 
up carefully, and watched lovingly : " not a 
man that I'd wish to exchange, and, what's 
more, I believe not a man that would wish to 
leave on his own account. We're different, I 
believe, from the English. Your officers value 
the horses ; we set store on the men. We 
train them more than we do the horses." 

Of the American trooper I will tell you 
more hereafter. He is not a gentleman to be 
trifled with. 

Next dawning, entering a buggy of fragile 
construction, with the old people from Chicago, 
I embarked on my perilous career. We ran 
straight up a mountain till we could see, sixty 
miles away, the white houses of Cook City on 
another mountain, and the whiplash-like trail 
leading thereto. The live air made me drunk. 
If Tom, the driver, had proposed to send the 
mares in a bee-line to the city, I should have 
assented, and so would the old lady, who 



142 American Notes 

chewed gum and talked about her symptoms. 
The tub-ended rock-dog, which is but the 
translated prairie-dog, broke across the road 
under our horses' feet, the rabbit and the chip- 
munk danced with fright ; we heard the roar 
of the river, and the road went round a corner. 
On one side piled rock and shale, that en- 
joined silence for fear of a general slide-down ; 
on the other a sheer drop, and a fool of a noisy 
river below. Then, apparently in the middle 
of the road, lest any should find driving too 
easy, a post of rock. Nothing beyond that 
save the flank of a cliff. Then my stomach 
departed from me, as it does when you swing, 
for we left the dirt, which was at least some 
guarantee of safety, and sailed out round the 
curve, and up a steep incline, on a plank-road 
built out from the cliff. The planks were 
nailed at the outer edge, and did not shift or 
creak very much — but enough, quite enough. 
That was the Golden Gate. I got my stomach 
back again when we trotted out on to a vast 
upland adorned with a lake and hills. Have 
you ever seen an untouched land — the face of 
virgin Nature ? It is rather a curious sight, 
because the hills are choked with timber that 
has never known an ax, and the storm has 
rent a way through this timber, so that a hun- 
dred thousand trees lie matted together in 
swathes ; and, since each tree lies where it 
falls, you may behold trunk and branch return- 
ing to the earth whence they sprang — exactly 



American Notes 143 

as the body of man returns — each limb making 
its own little grave, the grass climbing above 
the bark, till at last there remains only the 
outline of a tree upon the rank undergrowth. 

Then we drove under a cliff of obsidian, 
which is black glass, some two hundred feet 
high ; and the road at its foot was made of 
black glass that crackled. This was no great 
matter, because half an hour before Tom had 
pulled up in the woods that we might suffi- 
ciently admire a mountain who stood all by 
himself, shaking with laughter or rage. 

The glass cliff overlooks a lake where the 
beavers built a dam about a mile and a half 
long in a zig-zag line, as their necessities 
prompted. Then came the Government and 
strictly preserved them, and, as you shall learn 
later on, they be damn impudent beasts. The 
old lady had hardly explained the natural his- 
tory of beavers before we climbed some hills — 
it really didn't matter in that climate, because 
we could have scaled the stars — and (this 
mattered very much indeed) shot down a 
desperate, dusty slope, brakes shrieking on 
the wheels, the mares clicking among unseen 
rocks, the dust dense as a fog, and a wall of 
trees on either side. " How do the heavy 
four-horse coaches take it, Tom ? " I asked, 
remembering that some twenty-three souls had 
gone that way half an hour before. " Take it 
at the run ! " said Tom, spitting out the dust. 
Of course there was a sharp curve, and a bridge 



144 American Notes 

at the bottom, but luckily nothing met us, and 
we came to a wooden shanty called an hotel, 
in time for a crazy tiffin served by very gor- 
geous handmaids with very pink cheeks. 
When health fails in other and more exciting 
pursuits, a season as " help " in one of the 
Yellowstone hotels will restore the frailest 
constitution. 

Then by companies after tiffin we walked 
chattering to the uplands of Hell. They call 
it the Norris Geyser Basin on Earth. It was 
as though the tide of desolation had gone out, 
but would presently return, across innumerable 
acres of dazzling white geyser formation. 
There were no terraces here, but all other 
horrors. Not ten yards from the road a blast 
of steam shot up roaring every few seconds, a 
mud volcano spat filth to Heaven, streams of 
hot water rumbled under foot, plunged through 
the dead pines in steaming cataracts and died 
on a waste of white where green-gray, black- 
yellow, and link pools roared, shouted, bub- 
bled, or hissed as their wicked fancies prompt- 
ed. By the look of the eye the place should 
have been frozen over. By the feel of the feet 
it was warm. I ventured out among the pools, 
carefully following tracks, but one unwary 
foot began to sink, a squirt of water followed, 
and having no desire to descend quick into 
Tophet I returned to the shore where the mud 
and the sulphur and the nameless fat ooze- 
vegetation of Lethe lay. But the very road 



American Notes 145 

rang as though built over a gulf ; and besides, 
how was I to tell when the raving blast of steam 
would find its vent insufficient and blow the 
whole affair into Nirvana ? There was a po- 
tent stench of stale eggs everywhere, and 
crystals of sulphur crumbled under the foot, 
and the glare of the sun on the white stuff 
was blinding. Sitting under a bank, to me 
appeared a young trooper — ex-Cape mounted 
Rifles, this man : the real American seems to 
object to his army — mounted on a horse half- 
maddened by the noise and steam and smell. 
He carried only the six-shooter and cartridge- 
belt. On service the Springfield carbine 
(which is clumsy) and a cartridge-belt slung 
diagonally complete equipment. The sword 
is no earthly use for Border warfare and, ex- 
cept at. state parades, is never worn. The 
saddle is the McClellan tree over a four- 
folded blanket. Sweat-leathers you must pay 
for yourself. And the beauty of the tree is 
that it necessitates first very careful girthing 
and a thorough knowledge of tricks with the 
blanket to suit the varying conditions of the 
horse — a broncho will bloat in a night if he 
can get at a bellyful — and, secondly, even 
more careful riding to prevent galling. Crup- 
per and breast-band do not seem to be used, — 
but they are casual about their accouterments, 
— and the bit is the single, jaw-breaking curb 
which American war-pictures show us. That 
young man was very handsome, and the gray 
10 



146 American Notes 

service hat — most like the under half of a 
seedy terai — shaded his strong face admirably 
as his horse backed and shivered and sidled 
and plunged all over the road, and he lectured 
from his saddle, one foot out of the heavy- 
hooded stirrup, one hand on the sweating 
neck. " He's not used to the Park, this brute, 
and he's a confirmed bolter on parade ; but 
we understand each other." Whoosh! went 
the steam-blast down the road with a dry roar. 
Round spun the troop horse prepared to bolt, 
and, his momentum being suddenly checked, 
reared till I thought he would fall back on his 
rider. " Oh, no ; we settled that little mat- 
ter when I was breaking him," said Centaur. 
" He used to try to fall back on me. Isn't he 
a devil ? I think you'd laugh to see the way 
our regiments are horsed. Sometimes a big 
Montana beast like mine has a thirteen-two 
broncho pony for neighbor, and it's annoying 
if you're used to better things. And oh, how 
you have to ride your mount ! It's necessary ; 
but I can tell you at the end of a long day's 
march, when you'd give all the world to ride 
like a sack, it isn't sweet to get extra drill for 
slouching. When we're turned out, we're 
turned out for anything — not a fifteen-mile 
trot, but for the use and behoof of all the 
Northern States. I've been in Arizona. A 
trooper there who had been in India told me 
that Arizona was like Afghanistan. There's 
nothing under Heaven there except horned 



American Notes 147 

toads and rattlesnakes — and Indians. Our 
trouble is that we only deal with Indians and 
they don't teach us much, and of course the 
citizens look down on us and all that. As a 
matter of fact, I suppose we're really only 
mounted infantry, but remember we're the 
best mounted infantry in the world." And 
the horse danced a fandango in proof. 

" My faith ! " said I, looking at the dusty 
blouse, gray hat, soiled leather accouterments, 
and whalebone poise of the wearer. " If they 
are all like you, you are." 

" Thanks, whoever you may be. Of course 
;f we were turned into a lawn-tennis court and 
told to resist, say, your heavy cavalry, we'd 
be ridden off the face of the earth if we 
couldn't get away. We have neither the 
weight nor the drill for a charge. My horse, 
for instance, by English standards, is half- 
broken, and like all the others, he bolts when 
we're in line. But cavalry charge against 
cavalry charge doesn't happen often, and if it 
did, well — all our men know that up to a hun- 
dred yards they are absolutely safe behind 
this old thing." He patted his revolver pouch. 
" Absolutely safe from any shooting of yours. 
What man do you think would dare to use a 
pistol at even thirty yards, if his life depended 
on it ? Not one of your men. They can't 
shoot. We can. You'll hear about that down 
the Park — further up." 

Then, he added, courteously : " Just now it 



148 American Notes 

seems that the English supply all the men to 
the American Army. That's what makes 
them so good perhaps." And with mutual 
expressions of good-will we parted — he to an 
outlying patrol fifteen miles away, I to my 
buggy and the old lady, who, regarding the 
horrors of the fire-holes, could only say, 
" Good Lord ! " at thirty-second intervals. 
Her husband talked about " dreffel waste of 
steam-power," and we went on in the clear, 
crisp afternoon, speculating as to the forma- 
tion of geysers. 

" What I say," shrieked the old lady apropos 
of matters theological, " and what I say more, 
after having seen all that, is that the Lord has 
ordained a Hell for such as disbelieve His 
gracious works." 

Nota bene. — Tom had profanely cursed the 
near mare for stumbling. He looked straight 
in front of him and said no word, but the left 
corner of his left eye flickered in my direction. 

'* And if," continued the old lady, " if we 
find a thing so dreffel as all that steam and 
sulphur allowed on the face of the earth, 
mustn't we believe that there is something ten 
thousand times more terrible below prepared 
untoe our destruction ? " 

Some people have a wonderful knack of 
extracting comfort from things. I am 
ashamed to say I agreed ostentatiously with 
the old lady. She developed the personal 
view of the matter. 



American Notes 149 

" Now I shall be able to say something to 
Anna Fincher about her way of living. 
Shan't I, Blake ? " This to her husband. 

" Yes," said he, speaking slowly after a 
heavy tiffin. " But the girl's a good girl ; " 
and they fell to arguing as to whether the luck- 
less Anna Fincher really stood in need of 
lectures edged with Hell fire (she went to 
dances, I believe) , while I got out and walked 
in the dust alongside of Tom. 

" I drive blame cur'ous kinder folk through 
this place," said he. " Blame cur'ous. 'Seems 
a pity that they should ha' come so far just to 
liken Norris Basin to Hell. 'Guess Chicago 
would ha' served 'em, speaking in comparison, 
jest as good." 

We curved the hill and entered a forest of 
spruce, the path serpentining between the 
tree-boles, the wheels running silent on im- 
memorial mold. There was nothing alive in 
the forest save ourselves. Only a river was 
speaking angrily somewhere to the right. For 
miles we drove till Tom bade us alight and 
look at certain falls. Wherefore we stepped 
out of that forest and nearly fell down a cliff 
which guarded a tumbled river and returned 
demanding fresh miracles. If the water had 
run up-hill, we should perhaps have taken 
more notice of it ; but 'twas only a waterfall, 
and I really forget whether the water was 
warm or cold. There is a stream here called 
Firehole River. 1; is fed by the overflow 



150 American Notes 

from the various geysers and basins, — a warm 
and deadly river wherein no fish breed. I 
think we crossed it a few dozen times in the 
course of a day. 

Then the sun began to sink, and there was 
a taste of frost about, and we went swiftly 
from the forest into the open, dashed across 
a branch of the Firehole River and found a 
wood shanty, even rougher than the last at 
which, after a forty-mile drive, we were to dine 
and sleep. Half a mile from this place stood, 
on the banks of the Firehole River, a " beaver- 
lodge," and there were rumors of bears and 
other cheerful monsters in the woods on the 
hill at the back of the building. 

In the cool, crisp quiet of the evening I 
sought that river, and found a pile of newly 
gnawed sticks and twigs. The beaver works 
with the cold-chisel, and a few clean strokes 
suffice to level a four-inch bole. Across the 
water on the far bank glimmered, with the 
ghastly white of peeled dead timber, the 
beaver-lodge — a mass of disheveled branches. 
The inhabitants had dammed the stream lower 
down and spread it into a nice little lake. 
The question was would they come out for 
their walk before it got too dark to see. 
They came — blessings on their blunt muzzles, 
they came — as shadows come, drifting down 
the stream, stirring neither foot nor tail. There 
were three of them. One went down to in- 
vestigate the state of the dam ; the other two 



American Notes 151 

began to look for supper. There is only one 
thing more startling than the noiselessness of 
a tiger in the jungle, and that is the noiseless- 
ness of a beaver in the water. The straining 
ear could catch no sound whatever till they 
began to eat the thick green river-scudge that 
they call beaver-grass. I, bowed among the 
logs, held my breath and stared with all my 
eyes. They were not ten yards from me, and 
they would have eaten their dinner in peace 
so long as I had kept absolutely still. They 
were dear and desirable beasts, and I was just 
preparing to creep a step nearer when that 
wicked old lady from Chicago clattered down 
the bank, an umbrella in her hand, shrieking : 
" Beavers, beavers ! Young man, whurr are 
those beavers ? Good Lord ! What was that 
now ? " 

The solitary watcher might have heard a 
pistol shot ring through the air. I wish it had 
killed the old lady, but it was only the beaver 
giving warning of danger with the slap of his 
tail on the water. It was exactly like the 
" phink" of a pistol fired with damp powder. 
Then there were no more beavers — not a whis- 
ker-end. The lodge, however, was there, and a 
beast lower than any beaver began to throw 
stones at it because the old lady from Chicago 
said : " P'raps, if you rattle them up they'll 
come out. I do so want to see a beaver." 

Yet it cheers me to think I have seen the 
beaver in his wilds. Never will I go to the 



152 American Notes 

Zoo. That even, after supper — 'twere flattery 
to call it dinner — a Captain and a Subaltern 
of the cavalry post appeared at the hotel. 
These were the officers of whom the Mam- 
moth Springs Captain had spoken. The 
Lieutenant had read everything that he could 
lay hands on about the Indian army, espe- 
cially our cavalry arrangements, and was very 
full of a scheme for raising the riding Red 
Indians — it is not every noble savage that will 
make a trooper — into frontier levies — a sort 
of Khyber guard. " Only," as he said rue- 
fully, " there is no frontier these days, and all 
our Indian wars are nearly over. Those 
beautiful beasts will die out, and nobody will 
ever know what splendid cavalry they can 
make." 

The Captain told stories of Border warfare 
— of ambush, firing on the rear-guard, heat 
that split the skull better than any tomahawk, 
cold that wrinkled the very liver, night- 
stampedes of baggage-mules, raiding of cattle, 
and. hopeless stern-chases into inhospitable 
hills, when the cavalry knew that they were 
not only being outpaced but outspied. Then 
he spoke of one fair charge when a tribe gave 
battle in the open and the troopers rode in 
swordless, firing right and left with their re- 
volvers and — it was excessively uncomfy for 
that tribe. And I spoke of what men had 
told me of huntings in Burma, of hill-climbing 
in the Black Mountain affair, and so forth. 



American Notes 153 

" Exactly ! " said the Captain. " Nobody 
knows and nobody cares. What does it mat- 
ter to the Down-Easter who Wrap-up-his-Tail 
was ? " 

• " And what does the fat Briton know or 
care about Boh Hla-Oo ? " said I. Then both 
together : " Depend upon it, my dear, Sir, the 
army in both Anglo-Saxon countries is a mis- 
chievously underestimated institution, and it's 
a pleasure to meet a man who," etc., etc. 
And we nodded triangularly in all good will, 
and swore eternal friendship. The Lieuten- 
ant made a statement which rather amazed 
me. He said that, on account of the scarcity 
of business, many American officers were to 
be found getting practical instruction from 
littie troubles among the South American Re- 
publics. When the need broke out they 
would return. " There is so little for us to 
do, and the Republic has a trick of making us 
hedge and ditch for our pay. A little road- 
making on service is not a bad thing, but 
continuous navvying is enough to knock the 
heart out of any army." 

I agreed, and we sat up till two in the morn- 
ing swapping the lies of East and West. As 
that glorious chief Man-afraid-of-Pink-Rats 
once said to the Agent on the Reservation : 
" 'Melican officer good man. Heap good 
man. Drink me. Drink he. Drink me. 
Drink he. Drink he. Me blind. Heap good 
man ! " 



1 54 American Notes 



X. 

•' What man would read and read the selfsame faces 
And like the marbles which the windmill grinds, 
Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds, 
This year retracing last year's every year's dull 

traces, 
Where there are woods and unmanstified places ? " 

— Lowell. 

Once upon a time there was a carter who 
brought his team and a friend into the Yellow- 
stone Park without due thought. Presently 
they came upon a few of the natural beauties 
of the place, and that carter turned his team 
into his friend's team howling : " Get back o' 
this, Jim. All Hell's alight under our noses." 
And they call the place Hell's Half-acre to 
this day. We, too, the old lady from Chicago, 
her husband, Tom, and the good little mares 
came to Hell's Half-acre, which is about sixty 
acres, and when Tom said : " Would you like 
to drive over it?" we said: " Certainly no, 
and if you do, we shall report you to the 
authorities." There was a plain, blistered 
and peeled and abominable, and it was given 
over to the sportings and spoutings of devils 
who threw mud and steam and dirt at each 
other with whoops and halloos and bellowing 
curses. The place smelt of the refuse of the 
Pit, and that odor mixed with the clean, 



American Notes 



DO 



wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils 
throughout the day. Be it known that the 
Park is laid out, like Ollendorf, in exercises 
of progressive difficulty. Hell's Half-acre 
was a prelude to ten or twelve miles of geyser 
formation. We passed hot streams boiling in 
the forest ; saw whirls of steam beyond these, 
and yet other whiffs breaking through the 
misty green hills in the far distance ; we 
trampled on sulphur, and sniffed things much 
worse than any sulphur which is known to the 
upper world : and so came upon a parklike 
place where Tom suggested we should get out 
and play with the geysers. 

Imagine mighty green fields splattered with 
lime beds : all the flowers of the summer 
growing up to the very edge of the lime. 
That was the first glimpse of the geyser 
basins. The buggy had pulled up close to a 
rough, broken, blistered cone of stuff between 
ten and twenty feet high. There was trouble 
in that place — moaning, splashing, gurgling, 
and the clank of machinery. A spurt of boil- 
ing water jumped into the air and a wash 
of water followed. I removed swiftly. The 
old lady from Chicago shrieked. " What a 
wicked waste ! " said her husband. I think 
they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its spout 
was torn and ragged like the mouth of a gun 
when a shell has burst there. It grumbled 
madly for a moment or two and then was 
still. I crept over the steaming lime — it was 



156 American Notes 

the burning marl on which Satan lay — and 
looked fearfully down its mouth. You should 
never look a gift geyser in the mouth. I be- 
held a horrible slippery slimy funnel with 
water rising and falling ten feet at a time. 
Then the water rose to lip level with a rush 
and an infernal bubbling troubled this Devil's 
Bethesda before the sullen heave of the crest 
of a wave lapped over the edge and made me 
run. Mark the nature of the human soul ! 
I had begun with awe, not to say terror. I 
stepped back from the flanks of the Riverside 
Geyser saying : " Pooh ! Is that all it can 
do ? " Yet for aught I knew the whole thing 
might have blown up at a minute's notice ; 
she, he, or it being an arrangement of uncer- 
tain temper. 

We drifted on up that miraculous valley. 
On either side of us were hills from a thou- 
sand to fifteen feet high and wooded from 
heel to crest. As far as the eye could range 
forward were columns of steam in the air, 
misshapen lumps of lime, most like pre- 
adamite monsters, still pools of turquoise 
blue, stretches of blue cornflowers, a river 
that coiled on itself twenty times, boulders of 
strange colors, and ridges of glaring, staring 
white. 

The old lady from Chicago poked with her 
parasol at the pools as though they had been 
alive. On one particularly innocent-looking 
little puddle she turned her back for a mo- 



American Notes 157 

ment, and there rose behind her a twenty- 
foot column of water and steam. Then she 
shrieked and protested that " she never 
thought it would ha' done it," and the old 
man chewed his tobacco steadily, and 
mourned for steam power wasted. I em- 
braced the whitened stump of a middle-sized 
pine that had grown all too close to a hot 
pool's lip, and the whole thing turned over 
under my hand as a tree would do in a night- 
mare. From right and left came the trum- 
petings of elephants at play. I stepped into 
a pool of old dried blood rimmed with the 
nodding cornflowers ; the blood changed to 
ink even as I trod ! and ink and blood were 
washed away in a spurt of boiling sulphurous 
water spat out from the lee of a bank of flow- 
ers. This sounds mad, doesn't it ? 

A moonfaced trooper of German extraction 
— never was Park so carefully patrolled — 
came up to inform us that as yet we had not 
seen any of the real geysers, that they were 
all a mile or so up the valley, tastefully scat- 
tered round the hotel in which we would rest 
for the night. America is a free country, but 
the citizens look down on the soldier. / had 
to entertain that trooper. The old lady from 
Chicago would have none of him ; so we 
loafed along together, now across half-rotten 
pine logs sunk in swampy ground, anon over 
the ringing geyser formation, then knee-deep 
through long grass. 



158 American Notes 

•' And why did you 'list ? " said I. 

The moonfaced one's face began to work. 
I thought he would have a fit, but he told me 
a story instead — such a nice tale of a naughty 
little girl who wrote love letters to two men at 
once. She was a simple village wife, but a 
wicked " Family Novelette " countess couldn't 
have accomplished her ends better. She 
drove one man nearly wild with her pretty 
little treachery ; and the other man abandoned 
her and came West to forget. Moonface was 
that man. We rounded a low spur of hill, 
and came out upon a field of aching snowy 
lime, rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven 
with rents and diamonds and stars, stretching 
for more than half a mile in every direction. 
In this place of despair lay most of the big 
geysers who know when there is trouble in 
Krakatoa, who tell the pines when there is 
a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard, and who 
— are exhibited to visitors under pretty and 
fanciful names. The first mound that I en- 
countered belonged to a goblin splashing in 
his tub. I heard him kick, pull a shower- 
bath on his shoulders, gasp, crack his joints, 
and rub himself down with a towel ; then he 
let the water out of the bath, as a thoughtful 
man should, and it all sank down out of sight 
till another goblin arrived. Yet they called 
this place the Lioness and the Cubs. It lies 
not very far from the Lion, which is a sullen, 
roaring beast, and they say that when it is 



American Notes 159 

very active the other geysers presently follow 
suit. After the Krakatoa eruption all the 
geysers went mad together, spouting, spurting, 
and bellowing till men feared that they would 
rip up the whole field. Mysterious sympa- 
thies exist among them, and when the Giant- 
ess speaks (of her more anon) they all hold 
their peace. 

I was watching a solitary spring, when, far 
across the fields, stood up a plume of spun 
glass, iridescent and superb, against the sky. 
" That," said the trooper, " is Old Faithful. 
He goes off every sixty-five minutes to the 
minute, plays for five minutes, and sends up 
a column of water a hundred and fifty feet 
high. By the time you have looked at all the 
other geysers he will be ready to play." 

So we looked and we wondered at the Bee- 
hive, whose mouth is built up exactly like a hive; 
at the Turban (which is not in the least like a 
turban) ; and at many, many other geysers, 
hot holes, and springs. Some of them 
rumbled, some hissed, some went off spas- 
modically, and others lay still in sheets of 
sapphire and beryl. 

Would you believe that even these terrible 
creatures have to be guarded by the troopers 
to prevent the irreverent American from chip- 
ping the cones to pieces, or worse still, mak- 
ing the geysers sick? If you take of soft- 
soap a small barrelful and drop it down a 
geyser's mouth, that geyser will presently be 



160 American Notes 

forced to lay all before you and for days after- 
wards will be of an irritated and inconsistent 
stomach. When they told me the tale I was 
filled with sympathy. Now I wish that I had 
stolen soap and tried the experiment on some 
lonely little beast of a geyser in the woods. 
It sounds so probable — and so human. 

Yet he would be a bold man who would ad- 
minister emetics to the Giantess. She is flat- 
lipped, having no mouth, she looks like a 
pool, fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there 
is no ornamentation about her. At irregular 
intervals she speaks, and sends up a column 
of water over two hundred feet high to begin 
with ; then she is angry for a day and a half 
— sometimes for two days. Owing to her 
peculiarity of going mad in the night not 
many people have seen the Giantess at her 
finest ; but the clamor of her unrest, men say, 
shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like 
thunder among the hills. When I saw her 
trouble was brewing. The pool bubbled seri- 
ously, and at five-minute intervals, sank a 
foot or two, then rose, washed over the rim, 
and huge steam bubbles broke on the top. 
Just before an eruption the water entirely dis- 
appears from view. Whenever you see the 
water die down in a geyser-mouth get away 
as fast as you can. I saw a tiny little geyser 
suck in its breath in this way, and instinct 
made me retire while it hooted after me. 

Leaving the Giantess to swear, and spit, 




American Notes 161 

and thresh about, we went over to Old Faith- 
ful, who by reason of his faithfulness has 
benches close to him whence you may com- 
fortably watch. At the appointed hour we 
heard the water flying up and down the 
mouth with the sob of waves in a cave. 
Then came the preliminary gouts, then a roar 
and a rush, and that glittering column of 
diamonds rose, quivered, stood still for a 
minute. Then it broke, and the rest was a 
confused snarl of water not thirty feet high. 
All the young ladies — not more than twenty 
— in the tourist band remarked that it was 
" elegant," and betook themselves to writing 
their names in the bottoms of shallow pools. 
Nature fixes the insult indelibly, and the 
after-years will learn that " Hattie," " Sadie," 
" Mamie," " Sophie," and so forth, have taken 
out their hairpins, and scrawled in the face 
of Old Faithful. 

The congregation returned to the hotel to 
put down their impressions in diaries and 
note-books which they wrote up ostentatiously 
in the verandas. It was a sweltering hot 
day, albeit we stood somewhat higher than 
the summit of Jakko, and I left that raw pine- 
creaking caravanserai for the cool shade of a 
clump of pine between whose trunks glimmered 
tents. A batch of troopers came down the 
road, and flung themselves across country 
into their rough lines. Verily the 'Melican 
cavalry-man ca?i ride, though he keeps his 
ii 



162 American Notes 

accouterments pig, and his horse cow- 
fashion. 

I was free of that camp in five minutes — ■ 
free to play with the heavy lumpy carbines, 
to have the saddles stripped, and punch the 
horses knowingly in the ribs. One of the 
men had been in the fight with " Wrap-up-his- 
Tail " before alluded to, and he told me how 
that great chief, his horse's tail tied up in red 
calico, swaggered in front of the United 
States cavalry, challenging all to single com- 
bat. But he was slain, and a lew of his tribe 
with him. " There's no use in an Indian, 
anyway," concluded my friend. 

A couple of cowboys — real cowboys, not the 
Buffalo Bill article — jingled through the camp 
amid a shower of mild chaff. They were on 
their way to Cook City, I fancy, and I know 
that they never washed. But they were pic- 
turesque ruffians with long spurs, hooded stir- 
rups, slouch hats, fur weather-cloths over their 
knees, and pistol-butts easy to hand. 

" The cowboy's goin' under before long," 
said my friend. " Soon as the country's 
settled up he'll have to go. But he's mighty 
useful now. What should we do without the 
cowboy ? " 

" As how ? " said I, and the camp laughed. 

" He has the money. We have the know- 
how. He comes in in winter to play poker at 
the military posts. We play poker — a few. 
When he's lost his money we make him drunk 



American Notes 163 

and let him go. Sometimes we get the wrong 
man." And he told a tale of an innocent 
cowboy who turned up, cleaned out, at a post, 
and played poker for thirty-six hours. But it 
was the post that was cleaned ouc when that 
long-haired Caucasian Ah Sin removed him- 
self, heavy with everybody's pay, and declin- 
ing the proffered liquor. " Naow," said the 
historian, " I don't play with no cowboy unless 
he's a little bit drunk first." 

Ere I departed I gathered from more than 
one man that significant fact that up to one 
hundred yards he felt absolutely secure behind 
his revolver. 

" In England, I understand," quoth a lim- 
ber youth from the South, " in England a man 
aren't allowed to play with no firearms. He's 
got to be taught all that when he enlists. I 
didn't want much teaching how to shoot 
straight 'fore I served Uncle Sam. And that's 
just where it is. But you was talking about 
your horseguards now ? " 

I explained briefly some peculiarities of 
equipment connected with our crackest crack 
cavalry. I grieve to say the camp roared. 

" Take 'em over swampy ground. Let 'em 
run around a bit an' work the starch out of 
'em, an' then, Almighty, if we wouldn't plug 
'em at ease I'd eat their horses ! " 

" But suppose they engaged in the open ? " 
said I. 

" Engage the Hades. Not if there was a 



164 American Notes 

tree-trunk within twenty miles they couldn't 
engage in the open ! " 

Gentlemen, the officers, have you ever 
seriously considered the existence on earth of 
a cavalry who by preference would fight in 
timber ? The evident sincerity of the proposi- 
tion made me think hard as I moved over to 
the hotel and joined a party exploration, 
which, diving into the woods, unearthed a pit 
pool of burningest water fringed with jet 
black sand — all the ground near by being 
pure white. But miracles pall when they ar- 
rive at the rate of twenty a day. A flaming 
dragon-fly flew over the pool, reeled and 
dropped on the water, dying without a quiver 
of his gorgeous wings, and the pool said noth- 
ing whatever, but sent its thin steam wreaths 
up to the burning sky. I prefer pools that 
talk. 

There was a maiden — a very trim maiden — 
who had just stepped out of one of Mr. 
James's novels. She owned a delightful 
mother and an equally delightful father, a 
heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man of finance. The 
parents thought that their daughter wanted 
change. She lived in New Hampshire. Ac- 
cordingly, she had dragged them up to Alaska, 
to the Yosemite Valley, and was now returning 
leisurely via the Yellowstone just in time for 
the tail-end of the summer season at Saratoga. 
We had met once or twice before in the Park, 
and I had been amazed and amused at her 



American Notes 165 

critical commendation of the wonders that she 
saw. From that very resolute little mouth I 
received a lecture on American literature, the 
nature and inwardness of Washington society, 
the precise value of Cable's works as com- 
pared with " Uncle Remus " Harris, and a few 
other things that had nothing whatever to do 
with geysers, but were altogether delightful. 
Now an English maiden who had stumbled on 
a dust-grimed, lime-washed, sun-peeled, collar- 
less wanderer come from and going to good- 
ness knows where, would, her mother inciting 
her and her father brandishing his umbrella, 
have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer. 
Not so those delightful people from New 
Hampshire. They were good enough to treat 
me — it sounds almost incredible — as a human 
being, possibly respectable, probably not in 
immediate need of financial assistance. Papa 
talked pleasantly and to the point. The little 
maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her 
birth and that of her reading, and mama 
smiled benignly in the background. 

Balance this with a story of a young Eng- 
lish idiot I met knocking about inside his 
high collars, attended by a valet. He con- 
descended to tell me that " you can't be too 
careful who you talk to in these parts," and 
stalked on, fearing, I suppose, every minute 
for his social chastity. Now that man was a 
barbarian (I took occasion to tell him so), for 
he comported himself after the manner of the 



1 66 American Notes 

head-hunters of Assam, who are at perpetual 
feud one with another. 

You will understand that these foolish tales 
are introduced in order to cover the fact that 
this pen cannot describe the glories of the 
Upper Geyser basin. The evening I spent 
under the lee of the Castle Geyser sitting on 
a log with some troopers and watching a 
baronial keep forty feet high spouting hot 
water. If the Castle went oft first, they said 
the Giantess would be quiet, and vice versa ; 
and then they told tales till the moon got up 
and a party of campers in the woods gave us 
all something to eat. 

Next morning Tom drove us on, promising 
new wonders. He pulled up after a few miles 
at a clump of brushwood where an army was 
drowning. I could hear the sick gasps and 
thumps of the men going under, but when I 
broke through the brushwood the hosts had 
fled, and there were only pools of pink, black, 
and white lime, thick as turbid honey. They 
shot up a pat of mud every minute or two, 
choking in the effort. It was an uncanny 
sight. Do you wonder that in the old days 
the Indians were careful to avoid the Yellow- 
stone ? Geysers are permissible, but mud is 
terrifying. The old lady from Chicago took 
a piece of it, and in half an hour it dried into 
lime-dust and blew away between her fingers. 
All may a, — illusion, — you see ! Then we 
clinked over sulphur in crystals ; there was a 



American Notes 167 

waterfall of boiling water ; and a road across 
a level park hotly contested by the beavers. 
Every winter they build their dam and flood 
the low-lying land ; every summer that dam is 
torn up by the Government, and for half a 
mile you must plow axle-deep in water, the 
willows brushing into the buggy, and little 
waterways branching off right and left. The 
road is the main stream — just like the Bolan 
line in flood. If you turn up a byway, there 
is no more of you, and the beavers work your 
buggy into next year's dam. 

Then came soft, turfy forest that deadened 
the wheels, and two troopers — on detachment 
duty — came noiselessly behind us. One was 
the Wrap-up-his-Tail man, and we talked mer- 
rily while the half-broken horses bucked about 
among the trees till we came to a mighty hill 
all strewn with moss agates, and everybody 
had to get out and pant in that thin air. But 
how intoxicating it was ! The old lady from 
Chicago clucked like an emancipated hen as 
she scuttled about the road cramming pieces 
of rock into her reticule. She sent me fifty 
yards down the hill to pick up a piece of bro- 
ken bottle which she insisted was moss agate. 
" I've some o' that at home an' they shine. 
You go get it, young feller." 

As we climbed the long path the road grew 
viler and viler till it became without disguise 
the bed of a torrent ; and just when things 
were at their rockiest we emerged into a little 



1 68 American Notes 

sapphire lake — but never sapphire was so 
blue — called Mary's lake ; and that between 
eight and nine thousand feet above the sea. 
Then came grass downs, all on a vehement 
slope, so that the buggy following the new- 
made road ran on to the two off-wheels most- 
ly, till we dipped head-first into a ford, climbed 
up a cliff, raced along a down, dipped again 
and pulled up disheveled at " Larry's " for 
lunch and an hour's rest. Only " Larry " 
could have managed that school-feast tent on 
the lonely hillside. Need I say that he was 
an Irishman ? His supplies were at their 
lowest ebb, but Larry enveloped us all in the 
golden glamour of his speech ere we had de- 
scended, and the tent with the rude trestle-table 
became a palace, the rough fare, delicacies of 
Delmonico, and we, the abashed recipients of 
Larry's imperial bounty. It was only later 
that I discovered I had paid eight shillings 
for tinned beef, biscuits, and beer, but on the 
other hand Larry had said : " Will I go out 
an' kill a buffalo ? " And I felt that for me 
and for me alone would he have done it. 
Everybody else felt that way. Good luck go 
with Larry ! 

" An' now you'll all go an' wash your 
pocket-handkerchiefs in that beautiful hot 
spring round the corner," said he. " There's 
soap an' a washboard ready, an' 'tis not every 
day that ye can get hot water for nothing." 
He waved us large-handedly to the open 



American Notes 169 

downs while he put the tent to rights. There 
was no sense of fatigue on the body or distance 
in the air. Hill and dale rode on the eyeball. 
I could have clutched the far-off snowy peaks 
by putting out my hand. Never was such 
maddening air. Why we should have washed 
pocket-handkerchiefs Larry alone knows. It 
appeared to be a sort of religious rite. In a 
little valley overhung with gay painted rocks 
ran a stream of velvet brown and pink. It 
was hot — hotter than the hand could bear — 
and it colored the boulders in its course. 

There was the maiden from New Hampshire, 
the old lady from Chicago, papa, mama, the 
woman who chewed gum, and all the rest of 
them, gravely bending over a washboard and 
soap. Mysterious virtues lay in that queer 
stream. It turned the linen white as driven 
snow in five minutes, and then we lay on the 
grass and laughed with sheer bliss of being 
alive. This have I known once in Japan, 
once on the banks of the Columbia, what time 
the salmon came in and " California " howled, 
and once again in the Yellowstone by the light of 
the eyes of the maiden from New Hampshire. 
Four little pools lay at my elbow : one was of 
black water (tepid), one clear water (cold), 
one clear water (hot), one red water (boiling); 
my newly washed handkerchief covered them 
all. We marveled as children marvel. 

" This evening we shall do the grand canon 
of the Yellowstone ? " said the maiden. 



1 70 American Notes 

" Together ? " said I ; and she said yes. 

The sun was sinking when we heard the 
roar of falling waters and came to a broad 
river along whose banks we ran. And then — 
oh, then ! I might at a pinch describe the 
infernal regions, but not the other place. Be 
it known to you that the Yellowstone River 
has occasion to run through a gorge about 
eight miles long. To get to the bottom of the 
gorge it makes two leaps, one of about one 
hundred and twenty and the other of three 
hundred feet. I investigated the upper or 
lesser fall, which is close to the hotel. Up to 
that time nothing particular happens to the 
Yellowstone, its banks being only rocky, rather 
steep, and plentifully adorned with pines. At 
the falls it comes round a corner, green, solid, 
ribbed with a little foam and not more than 
thirty yards wide. Then it goes over still 
green and rather more solid than before. 
After a minute or two you, sitting upon a rock 
directly above the drop, begin to understand 
that something has occurred ; that the river 
has jumped a huge distance between solid 
cliff walls — and what looks like the gentle froth 
of ripples lapping the sides of the gorge below 
is really the outcome of great waves. And 
the river yells aloud ; but the cliffs do not al- 
low the yells to escape. 

That inspection began with curiosity and 
finished in terror, for it seemed that the whole 
world was sliding in chrysolite from under my 



American Notes 171 

feet. I followed with the others round the 
corner to arrive at the brink of the canon : we 
had to climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent 
to begin with, for the ground rises more than 
the river drops. Stately pine woods fringe 
either lip of the gorge, which is — the Gorge of 
the Yellowstone. 

All I can say is that without warning or 
preparation I looked into a gulf seventeen 
hundred feet deep with eagles and fish-hawks 
circling far below. And the sides of that gulf 
were one wild welter of color — crimson, em- 
erald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed 
with port-wine, snow-white, vermilion, lemon r 
and silver-gray, in wide washes. The sides 
did not fall sheer, but were graven by time and 
water and air into monstrous heads of kings, 
dead chiefs, men and women of the old time. 
So far below that no sound of its strife could 
reach us, the Yellowstone River ran — a finger- 
wide strip of jade-green. The sunlight took 
those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to 
those that nature had already laid there. Once 
I saw the dawn break over a lake in Rajputana 
and the sun set over the Oodey Sagar amid a 
circle of Holman Hunt hills. This time I was 
watching both performances going on below me 
— upside down you understand — and the colors 
were real ! The canon was burning like Troy 
town ; but it would burn forever, and, thank 
goodness, neither pen nor brush could ever 
portray its splendors adequately. The Acad- 



172 American Notes 

emy would reject the picture for a chromolith- 
ograph. The public would scoff at the letter- 
press for Daily Telegraphese. " I will leave 
this thing alone," said I ; " 'tis my peculiar 
property. Nobody else shall share it with 
me." Evening crept through the pines that 
shadowed us, but the full glory of the day 
flamed in that canon as we went out very 
cautiously to a jutting piece of rock — blood- 
red or pink it was — that overhung the deepest 
deeps of all. Now I know what it is to sit 
enthroned amid the clouds of sunset. Gid- 
diness took away all sensation of touch or form ; 
but the sense of blinding color remained. 
When I reached the mainland again I had 
sworn that I had been floating. The maid 
from New Hamsphire said no word for a very 
long time. She then quoted poetry, which 
was perhaps the best thing she could have 
done. 

" And to think that this show-place has been 
going on all these days an' none of we ever 
saw it," said the old lady from Chicago, with 
an acid glance at her husband. 

il No, only the Injuns," said he, unmoved ; 
and the maiden and I laughed long. Inspi- 
ration is fleeting, beauty is vain, and the power 
of the mind for wonder limited. Though the 
shining hosts themselves had risen choiring 
from the bottom cf the gorge they would not 
have prevented her papa and one baser than 
himself from rolling stones down those stupen- 



American Notes 173 

dous rainbow-washed slides. Seventeen hun- 
dred feet of steepest pitch and rather more 
than seventeen hundred colors for log or 
boulder to whirl through ! So we heaved 
things and saw them gather way and bound 
from white rock to red or yellow, dragging 
behind them torrents of color, till the noise of 
their descent ceased and they bounded a hun- 
dred yards clear at the last into the Yellow- 
stone. 

" I've been down there," said Tom that 
evening. " It's easy to get down if you're 
careful — just sit and slide ; but getting up is 
worse. An' I found, down below there, two 
rocks just marked with a pictur of the canon. 
I wouldn't sell those rocks not for fifteen 
.dollars." 

And papa and I crawled down to the Yellow- 
stone — just above the first little fall — to wet a 
line for good luck. The round moon came up 
and turned the cliffs and pines into silver ; a 
two-pound trout came up also, and we slew 
him among the rocks, nearly tumbling into that 

wild river. 

# # # # # 

Then out and away to Livingstone once 
more. The maiden from New Hampshire 
disappeared ; papa and mama with her 
disappeared. Disappeared, too, the old lady 
from Chicago and all the rest, while I thought 
of all that I had not seen — the forest of petri- 
fied trees with amethyst crystals in their black 



174 American Notes 

hearts ; the great Yellowstone Lake where 
you catch your trout alive in one spring and 
drop him into another to boil him ; and most 
of all of that mysterious Hoodoo region where 
all the devils not employed in the geysers live 
and kill the wandering bear and elk, so that 
the scared hunter finds in Death Gulch piled 
carcasses of the dead whom no man has 
smitten. Hoodoo-land with the overhead 
noises, the bird and beast and devil rocks, the 
mazes and the bottomless pits, — all these things 
I missed. On the return road Yankee Jim 
and Diana of the Crossways gave me kindly 
greeting as the train paused an instant before 
their door, and at Livingstone whom should I 
see but Tom the driver ? 

" I've done with the Yellowstone and decided 
to clear out East somewheres," said he. 
" Your talkin' about movin' round so gay an' 
careless made me kinder restless ; I'm movin' 
out." 

Lord forgive us for our responsibility one to 
another ! 

" And your partner ? " said I. 

" Here's him," said Tom, introducing a 
gawky youth with a bundle ; and I saw those 
two young men turn their faces to the East. 



American Notes 175 



XI. 



" A fool also is full of words : a man cannot tell what 
shall be ; and what shall be after him who can tell ? " 

It has just occurred to me with great force 
that delightful as these letters are to myself 
their length and breadth and depth may be 
just the least little bit in the world wearisome 
to you over there. I will compress myself 
rigorously, though I should very much like to 
deliver a dissertation on the American Army 
and the possibilities of its extension. 

The American Army is a beautiful little 
army. Some day, when all the Indians are 
happily dead or drunk, it ought to make the 
finest scientific and survey corps that the 
world has ever seen. It does excellent work 
now, but there is this defect in its nature ; it 
is officered, as you know, from West Point, but 
the mischief of it is that West Point seems to 
be created for the purpose of spreading a 
general knowledge of military matters among 
the people. A boy goes up to that institution, 
gets his pass, and returns to civil life, so they 
tell me, with a dangerous knowledge that he is 
a sucking Moltke, and may apply his learning 
when occasion offers. Given trouble, that 
man will be a nuisance, because he is a 



176 American Notes 

hideously versatile American to begin with, as 
cock-sure of himself as a man can be, and 
with all the racial disregard for human life to 
back him through his demi-semi-professional 
generalship. 

In a country where, as the records of the 
daily papers show, men engaged in a conflict 
with police or jails are all too ready to adopt 
a military formation, and get heavily shot in a 
sort of cheap, half-instructed warfare instead 
of being decently scared by the appearance of 
the military, this sort of arrangement does not 
seem wise. 

The bond between the States is of amazing 
tenuity. So long as they do not absolutely 
march into the District of Columbia, sit on 
the Washington statues, and invent a flag 
of their own, they can legislate, lynch, hunt 
negroes through swamps, divorce, railroad, 
and rampage as much as ever they choose. 
They do not need knowledge of their own 
military strength to back their genial law- 
lessness. 

That Regular Army, which is a dear little 
army, should be kept to itself, blooded on de- 
tachment duty, turned into the paths of 
science, and now and again assembled at 
feasts of Freemasons and so forth. 

It's too tiny to be a political power. The 
immortal wreck of the Grand Army of the 
Republic is a political power of the largest 
and most unblushing description. 



American Notes 177 

It ought not to help to lay the foundations 
of an amateur military power that is blind 
and irresponsible. . . . 

Be thankful that the balance of this lecture 
is suppressed, and with it the account of a 
" shiveree " which I attended in Livingstone 
City : and the story of the editor and the sub- 
editor (the latter was a pet cougar, or moun- 
tain lion, who used, they said, skilfully to 
sub-edit disputants in the office) of the Liv- 
ingstone daily paper. 

Omitting a thousand matters of first im- 
portance, let me pick up the thread of things 
on a narrow-gauge line that took me down to 
Salt Lake. The run between Delhi and 
Ahmedabad on a May day would have been 
bliss compared to this torture. There was 
nothing but glare and desert and alkali dust. 
There was no smoking-accommodation. I 
sat in the lavatory with the conductor and a 
prospector who told stories about Indian 
atrocities in the voice of a dreaming child — 
oath following oath as smoothly as clotted 
cream laps the mouth of the jug. I don't 
think he knew he was saying anything out of 
the way, but nine or ten of those oaths were 
new to me, and one even made the conductor 
raise his eyebrows. 

" And when a man's alone mostly, leadin' 

his horse across the hills, he gets to talk aloud 

to himself as it was," said the weather-worn 

retailer of tortures. A vision rose before me 

12 



178 American Notes 

of this man trampling the Bannack City trail 
under the stars — swearing, always swearing. 

Bundles of rags that were pointed out as 
Red Indians, boarded the train from time to 
time. Their race privileges allow them free 
transit on the platforms of the cars. They 
mustn't come inside of course, and equally of 
course the train never thinks of pulling up 
for them. I saw a squaw take us flying and 
leave us in the same manner when we were 
spinning round a curve. Like the Punjabi, 
the Red Indian gets out by preference on the 
trackless plain and walks stolidly to the 
horizon. He never says where he is 
going. . . . 

Salt Lake. I am concerned for the sake 
of Mr. Phil Robinson, his soul. You will 
remember that he wrote a book called Saints 
and Sinners in which he proved very prettily 
that the Mormon was almost altogether an 
estimable person. Ever since my arrival at 
Salt Lake I have been wondering what made 
him write that book. On mature reflection, 
and after a long walk round the city, I am 
inclined to think it was the sun, which is very 
powerful hereabouts. 

By great good luck the evil-minded train 
already delayed twelve hours by a burnt 
bridge, brought me to the city on a Saturday 
by way of that valley which the Mormons 
aver their efforts had caused to blossom 
like the rose. Some hours previously I 



American Notes 179 

had entered a new world where, in conver- 
sation, every one was either a Mormon or 
a Gentile. It is not seemly for a free and 
independent citizen to dub himself a Gentile, 
but the Mayor of Ogden — which is the Gen- 
tile city of the valley — told me that there must 
be some distinction between the two flocks. 

Long before the fruit orchards of Logan or 
the shining levels of the Salt Lake had been 
reached that Mayor — himself a Gentile, and 
one renowned for his dealings with the Mor- 
mons — told me that the great question of the 
existence of the power within the power was 
being gradually solved by the ballot and by 
education. 

" We have," quoth he, " hills round and 
about here, stuffed full of silver and gold and 
lead, and all Hell atop of the Mormon church 
can't keep the Gentile from flocking in when 
that's the case. At Ogden, thirty miles from 
Salt Lake, this year the Gentile vote swamped 
the Mormon at the Municipal elections, and 
next year we trust that we shall be able to 
repeat our success in Salt Lake itself. In 
that city the Gentiles are only one-third of 
the total population, but the mass of 'em are 
grown men, capable of voting. Whereas the 
Mormons are cluttered up with children. I 
guess as soon as we have purely Gentile offi- 
cers in the township, and the control of the 
policy of the city, the Mormons will have to 
back down considerable. They're bound to 



i8o American Notes 

go before long. My own notion is that it's 
the older men who keep alive the opposition 
to the Gentile and all his works. The younger 
ones, spite of all the elders tell 'em, will mix 
with the Gentile, and read Gentile books, 
and you bet your sweet life there's a holy in- 
fluence working toward conversion in the kiss 
of an average Gentile — specially when the 
girl knows that 'he won't think it necessary 
for her salvation to load the house up with 
other women-folk. I guess the younger gen- 
eration are giving sore trouble to the elders. 
What's that you say about polygamy ? It's a 
penal offense now under a Bill passed not 
long ago. The Mormon has to elect one wife 
and keep to her. If he's caught visiting any 
of the others — do you see that cool and rest- 
ful brown stone building way over there 
against the hillside ? That's the penitentiary. 
He is sent there to consider his sins, and he 
pays a fine, too. But most of the police in 
Salt Lake are Mormons, and I don't suppose 
they are too hard on their friends. I presoom 
there's a good deal of polygamy practised on 
the sly. But the chief trouble is to get the 
Mormon to see that the Gentile isn't the 
doubly-damned beast that the elders repre- 
sent. Only get the Gentiles well into the 
State, and the whole concern is bound to go 
to pieces in a very little time." 

And the wish being father to the thought, 
" Why, certainly," said I, and began to take 



American Notes 181 

in the valley of Deseret, the home of the 
latter-day saints, and the abode perhaps of as 
much misery as has ever been compressed 
into forty years. The good folk at home will 
not understand, but you will, what follows. 
You know how in Bengal to this day the 
child-wife is taught to curse her possible co- 
wife, ere yet she has gone to her husband's 
house ? And the Bengali woman has been 
accustomed to polygamy for a few hundred 
years. You know, too, the awful jealousy be- 
tween mother wife and barren behind the 
purdah — the jealousy that culminates some- 
times in the poisoning of the well-beloved 
son ? Now and again, an Englishwoman 
employs a high-caste Mussulman nurse, and 
in the offices of that hire women are apt to 
forget the differences of color, and to speak 
unreservedly as twin daughters under Eve's 
curse. The nurse tells very strange and 
awful things. She has, and this the Mor- 
mons count a privilege, been born into poly- 
gamy ; but she loathes and detests it from 
the bottom of her jealous soul. And to the 
lot of the Bengali co-wife — " the cursed of the 
cursed — the daughter of the dunghill — the 
scald-head and the barren-mute " (you know 
the rest of that sweet commination-service) — 
one creed, of all the White creeds to-day, 
deliberately introduces the white woman taken 
from centuries of training, which have taught 
her that it is right to control the undivided 



182 American Notes 

heart of one man. To quench her most 
natural rebellion, that amazing creed and fan- 
tastic jumble of Mahometanism, the Mosaic 
law, and imperfectly comprehended fragments 
of Freemasonry, calls to its aid all the powers 
of a hell conceived and elaborated by coarse- 
minded hedgers and ditchers. A sweet view, 
isn't it ? 

All the beauty of the valley could not make 
me forget it. But the valley is very fair. 
Bench after bench of land, flat as a table 
against the flanks of the ringing hills, marks 
where the Salt Lake rested for a while as it 
sunk from an inland sea to a lake fifty miles 
long and thirty broad. Before long the 
benches will be covered with houses. At 
present these are hidden among the green 
trees on the dead flat of the valley. You 
have read a hundred times how the streets of 
Salt Lake City are very broad, furnished with 
rows of shade trees and gutters of fresh water. 
This is true, but I struck the town in a 
season of great drouth — that same drouth 
which is playing havoc with the herds of 
Montana. The trees were limp, and the rills 
of sparkling water that one reads about were 
represented by dusty, paved courses. Main 
Street appears to be inhabited by the com- 
mercial Gentile, who has made of it a busy, 
bustling thoroughfare, and, in the eye of the 
sun, swigs the ungodly lager and smokes the 
improper cigar all day long. For which I 



American Notes 183 

like him. At the head of Main Street stand 
the lions of the place ; the Temple and the 
Tabernacle, the Tithing House, and the 
houses of Brigham Young, whose portrait is 
on sale in most of the booksellers' shops. 
Incidentally it may be mentioned that the 
late Amir of Utah does not unremotely re- 
semble His Highness the Amir of Afghanis- 
tan, whom these fortunate eyes have seen. 
And I have no desire to fall into the hands 
■>f the Amir. The first thing to be seen was, 
of course, the outward exponent of a creed. 
Armed with a copy of the Book of Mormon, 
for better comprehension, I went to form 
rash opinions. Some day the Temple will be 
finished. It was begun only thirty years 
ago, and up to date rather more than three 
million dollars and a half have been expended 
in its granite bulk. The walls are ten feet 
thick ; the edifice itself is about a hundred 
feet high ; and its towers will be nearly two 
hundred. And that is all there is of it, unless 
you choose to inspect more closely ; always 
reading the Book of Mormon as you walk. 
Then the wondrous puerility, of what I sup- 
pose we must call the design, becomes ap- 
parent. These men, directly inspired from 
on High, heaped stone on stone and pillar on 
pillar, without achieving either dignity, relief, 
or interest. There is, over the main door, 
some pitiful scratching in stone representing 
the all-seeing eye, the Masonic grip, the sun, 



184 American Notes 

moon, and stars, and, perhaps, other skittles. 
The flatness and meanness of the thing al- 
most makes you weep when you look at the 
magnificent granite in blocks strewn abroad, 
and think of the art that three million dollars 
might have called in to the aid of the church. 
It is as though a child had said : " Let us 
draw a great, big, fine house — finer than any 
house that ever was," — and in that desire had 
laboriously smudged along with a ruler and 
pencil, piling meaningless straight lines on 
compass-drawn curves, with his tongue fol- 
lowing every movement of the inept hand. 
Then sat I down on a wheelbarrow and read 
the Book of Mormon, and behold the spirit of 
the book was the spirit of the stone before 
me. The estimable Joseph and Hyrum Smith 
struggling to create a new Bible, when they 
knew nothing of the history of Old and New 
Testament, and the inspired architect mud- 
dling with his bricks — they were brothers. 
But the book was more interesting than the 
building. It is written, and all the world has 
read, how to Joseph Smith an angel came 
down from Heaven with a pair of celestial 
gig-lamps, whereby he was marvelously en- 
abled to interpret certain plates of gold scrib- 
bled over with dots and scratches, and dis- 
covered by him in the ground. Which plates 
Joseph Smith did translate — only he spelt 
the mysterious characters " caractors " — and 
out of the dots and scratches produced a 



American Notes 185 

volume of six hundred closely printed pages, 
containing the books of Nephi, first and sec- 
ond, Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mormon, 
Mosiah, the Record of Zeniff, the book of 
Alma Helaman, the third of Nephi, the book 
of Ether (the whole thing is a powerful 
anaesthetic, by the way), and the final book of 
Mononi. Three men, of whom one I believe 
is now living, bear solemn witness that the 
angel with the spectacles appeared unto them ; 
eight other men swear solemnly that they 
have seen the golden plates of the revelation ; 
and upon this testimony the book of Mormon 
stands. The Mormon Bible begins at the 
days of Zedekiah, King of Judah, and ends in 
a wild and weltering quagmire of tribal fights, 
bits of revelation, and wholesale cribs from 
the Bible. Very sincerely did I sympathize 
with the inspired brothers as I waded through 
their joint production. As a humble fellow- 
worker in the field of fiction, I knew what it 
was to get good names for one's characters. 
But Joseph and Hyrum were harder bestead 
than ever I have been ; and bolder men to 
boot. They created Teancum and Corian- 
tumy Pahoran, Kishkumen, and Gadianton, 
and other priceless names which the memory 
does not hold ; but of geography they wisely 
steered clear, and were astutely vague as 
to the locality of places, because you see 
they were by no means certain what lay 
in the next county to their own. They 



1 86 American Notes 

marched and countermarched bloodthirsty 
armies across their pages ; and added new and 
amazing chapters to the records of the New 
Testament, and reorganized the heavens and 
the earth as it is always lawful to do in print. 
But they could not achieve style, and it was 
foolish of them to let into their weird Mosaic 
pieces of the genuine Bible whenever the 
laboring pen dropped from its toilsome parody 
to a sentence or two of vile, bad English or 
downright "penny dreadfulism." "And 
Moses said unto the people of Israel : 
' Great Scott ! what air you doing? ' " There 
is no sentence in the Book of Mormon word 
for word like the foregoing ; but the general 
tone is not widely different. 

There are the makings of a very fine creed 
about Mormonism. To begin with, the 
Church is rather more absolute than that of 
Rome. Drop the polygamy plank in the plat- 
form, but on the other hand deal lightly with 
certain forms of excess. Keep the quality of 
the recruits down to a low mental level and 
see that the best of the agricultural science 
available is in the hands of the Elders, and 
you have there a first-class engine for pioneer 
work. The tawdry mysticism and the bor- 
rowings from Freemasonry serve the low-caste 
Swede and the Dane, the Welshman and the 
Cornish cottar, just as well as a highly organ- 
ized Heaven. 

I went about the streets and peeped into 



American Notes 187 

people's front windows, and the decorations 
upon the tables were after the manner of the 
year 1850. Main Street was full of country 
folk from the outside come in to trade with 
the Zion Mercantile Co-operative Institute. 
The Church, I fancy, looks after the finances 
of this thing, and it consequently pays good 
dividends. The faces of the women were not 
lovely. Indeed, but for the certainty that 
ugly persons are just as irrational in the mat- 
ter of undivided love as the beautiful, it 
seemed that polygamy was a blessed institu- 
tion for the women, and that only the spiritual 
power could drive the hulking, board-faced 
men into it. The women wore hideous gar- 
ments, and the men seemed to be tied up 
with string. They would market all that 
afternoon, and on Sunday go to the praying- 
place. I tried to talk to a few of them, but 
they spoke strange tongues and stared and 
behaved like cows. Yet one woman, and not 
an altogether ugly one, confided to me that 
she hated the idea of Salt Lake City being 
turned into a show-place for the amusement 
of the Gentile. 

" If we 'ave our own institutions, that ain't 
no reason why people should come 'ere and 
stare at us, his it ? " 

The dropped " h " betrayed her. 

" And when did you leave England ? " I 
said. 

" Summer of '84. I am from Dorset," she 



1 88 American Notes 

said. " The Mormon agents was very good 
to us, and we was very poor. Now we're 
better off — my father an' mother an' me." 

" Then you like the State ? " 

She misunderstood at first. " Oh, I ain't 
livin' in the state of polygamy. Not me yet. 
I ain't married. I like where I am. I've got 
things o' my own — and some land." 

" But I suppose you will " 

" Not me. I ain't like them Swedes an' 
Danes. I ain't got nothing to say for or 
against polygamy. It's the Elders' business, 
an' between you an' me I don't think it's 
going on much longer. You'll 'ear them in 
the 'ouse to-morrer talkin' as if it was 
spreadin' all over America. The Swedes 
they think it his. I know it hisn't." 

" But you've got your land all right." 

" Oh, yes, we've got our land an' we never 
say aught against polygamy o' course — father 
an' mother an' me." 

It strikes me that there is a fraud some- 
where. You've never heard of the rice- 
Christians, have you ? 

I should have liked to have spoken to the 
maiden at length, but she dived into the Zion 
Co-op. and a man captured me, saying that it 
was my bounden duty to see the sights of Salt 
Lake. These comprised the egg-shaped 
Tabernacle, the Beehive, and town houses of 
Brigham Young; the same great ruffian's 
tomb with assorted samples of his wives sleep- 



American Notes 189 

ing round him (just as the eleven faithful ones 
sleep round the ashes of Runjit Singh outside 
Fort Lahore), and one or two other curiosi- 
ties. But all these things have been de- 
scribed by abler pens than mine. The animal- 
houses where Brigham used to pack his wives 
are grubby villas ; the Tabernacle is a 
shingled fraud, and the Tithing House where 
all the revenue returns seem to be made, much 
resembles a stable. The Mormons have a 
paper currency of their own — ecclesiastical 
bank-notes which are exchanged for local pro- 
duce. But the little boys of the place prefer 
the bullion of the Gentiles. It is not pleasant 
to be taken round a township with your guide 
stopping before every third house to say : 
" That's where Elder so and so kept Amelia 
Bathershins, his fifth wife — no, his third. 
Amelia she was took on after Keziah, but 
Keziah was the Elder's pet, an' he didn't dare 
to let Amelia come across Keziah for fear of 
her spilin' Keziah's beauty." The Mussul- 
mans are quite right. The minute that all the 
domestic details of polygamy are discussed in 
the mouths of the people, that institution is 
ready to fall. I shook off my guide when he 
had told me his very last doubtful tale, and 
went on alone. An ordered peace and a per- 
fection of quiet luxury is the note of the city 
of Salt Lake. The houses stand in generous 
and well-groomed grass-plots, none very much 
worse or better than their neighbors. 



190 American Notes 

Creepers grow over the house fronts, and 
there is a very pleasant music of wind among 
the trees in the vast empty streets bringing a 
smell of hay and the flowers of summer. 

On a tableland overlooking all the city 
stands the United States garrison of infantry 
and artillery. The State of Utah can do 
nearly anything it pleases until that much-to- 
be-desired hour when the Gentile vote shall 
quietly swamp out Mormonism ; but the gar- 
rison is kept there in case of accidents. The 
big, shark-mouthed, pig-eared, heavy-boned 
farmers sometimes take to their creed with 
wildest fanaticism, and in past years have 
made life excessively unpleasant for the Gen- 
tile when he was few in the land. But to- 
day, so far from killing openly or secretly, or 
burning Gentile farms, it is all the Mormon 
dares do to feebly try to boycott the inter- 
loper. His journals preach defiance to the 
United States Government, and in the Taber- 
nacle of a Sunday the preachers follow suit. 
When I went down there the place was full of 
people who would have been much better for 
a washing. A man rose up and told them 
that they were the chosen of God, the elect of 
Israel, that they were to obey their priest, and 
that there was a good time coming. I fancy 
that they had heard all this before so many 
times it produced no impression whatever ; 
even as the sublimest mysteries of another 
Faith lost salt through constant iteration. 



American Notes 191 

They breathed heavily through their noses and 
stared straight in front of them — impassive as 
flatfish. 

And that evening I went up to the garrison 
post — one of the most coveted of all the army 
commands — and overlooked the City of the 
Saints as it lay in the circle of its forbidding 
hills. You can speculate a good deal about the 
mass of human misery, the loves frustrated, 
the gentle hearts broken, and the strong souls 
twisted from the law of life to a fiercer fol- 
lowing of the law of death, that the hills have 
seen. How must it have been in the old days 
when the footsore emigrants broke through 
into the circle and knew that they were cut off 
from hope of return or sight of friends — were 
handed over to the power of the friends that 
called themselves priests of the Most High ? 
" But for the grace of God there goes Richard 
Baxter," as the eminent divine once said. It 
seemed good that fate did not order me to be 
a brick in the up-building of the Mormon 
church, that has so aptly established herself 
by the borders of a lake bitter, salt, and hope- 
less. 



192 American Notes 



XII. 

" Much have I seen, 
Cities and men." 

Let there be no misunderstanding about 
the matter. I love this People, and if any 
contemptuous criticism has to be done, I will 
do it myself. My heart has gone out to them 
beyond all other peoples ; and for the life of 
me I cannot tell why. They are bleeding- 
raw at the edges, almost more conceited than 
the English, vulgar with a massive vulgarity 
which is as though the Pyramids were coated 
with Christmas-cake sugar-works. Cocksure 
they are, lawless and as casual as they are 
cocksure ; but I love them, and I realized it 
when I met an Englishman who laughed at 
them. He proved conclusively that they 
were all wrong, from their tariff to their go- 
as-you-please Civil Service, and beneath the 
consideration of a true Briton. 

" I admit everything," said I. " Their 
Government's provisional ; their law's the 
notion of the moment; their railways are 
made of hairpins and match-sticks, and most 
of their good luck lives in their woods and 
mines and rivers and not in their brains ; but 
for all that, they be the biggest, finest, and 
best people on the surface of the globe! 



American Notes 193 

Just you wait a hundred years and see how 
they'll behave when they've had the screw put 
on them and have forgotten a few of the 
patriarchal teachings of the late Mister George 
Washington. Wait till the Anglo-American- 
German-Jew — the Man of the Future — is 
properly equipped. He'll have just the least 
little kink in his hair now and again ; he'll 
carry the English lungs above the Teuton feet 
that can walk forever ; and he will wave long, 
thin, bony Yankee hands with the big blue 
veins on the wrist, from one end of the earth to 
the other. He'll be the finest writer, poet, and 
dramatist, 'specially dramatist, that the world 
as it recollects itself has ever seen. By virtue 
of his Jew blood — just a little, little drop — 
he'll be a musician and a painter too. At 
present there is too much balcony and too 
little Romeo in the life-plays of his fellow- 
citizens. Later on, when the proportion is 
adjusted and he sees the possibilities of his 
land, he will produce things that will make the 
effete East stare. He will also be a complex 
and highly composite administrator. There 
is nothing known to man that he will not be, 
and his country will sway the world with one 
foot as a man tilts a seesaw plank ! " 

" But this is worse than the Eagle at its 
worst. Do you seriously believe all that ? " 
said the Englishman. 

" If I believe anything seriously, all this I 
most firmly believe. You wait and see. 
13 



194 American Notes 

Sixty million people, chiefly of English in- 
stincts, who are trained from youth to believe 
that nothing is impossible, don't slink through 
the centuries like Russian peasantry. They 
are bound to leave their mark somewhere, and 
don't you forget it." 

But isn't it sad to think that with all Eter- 
nity behind and before us we cannot, even 
though we would pay for it with sorrow, filch 
from the Immensities one hundred poor years 
of life, wherein to watch the two Great Exper- 
iments ? A hundred years hence India and 
America will be worth observing. At present 
the one is burned out and the other is only just 
stoking up. When I left my opponent there 
was much need for faith, because I fell into 
the hands of a perfectly delightful man whom 
I had met casually in the street, sitting in a 
chair on the pavement, smoking a huge cigar. 
He was a commercial traveler, and his beat 
lay through Southern Mexico, and he told me 
tales, of forgotten cities, stone gods up to their 
sacred eyes in forest growth, Mexican priests, 
rebellions, and dictatorships, that made my hair 
curl. It was he who dragged me forth to 
bathe in Salt Lake, which is some fifteen miles 
away from the city, and reachable by many 
trains which are but open tram-cars. The 
track, like all American tracks, was terrifying 
in its roughness ; and the end of the journey 
disclosed the nakedness of the accommoda- 
tion. There were piers and band houses and 



American Notes 195 

refreshment stalls built over the solid gray 
levels of the lake, but they only accentuated 
the utter barrenness of the place. Americans 
don't mix with their scenery as yet. 

And " Have faith," said the commercial 
traveler as he walked into water heavy as 
quicksilver. " Walk ! " I walked, and I walked 
till my legs flew up and I had to walk as one 
struggling with a high wind, but still I rode 
head and shoulders above the water. It was 
a horrible feeling, this inability to sink. 
Swimming was not much use. You couldn't 
get a grip of the water, so I e'en sat me down 
and drifted like a luxurious anemone among 
the hundreds that were bathing in that place. 
You could wallow for three-quarters of an 
hour in that warm, sticky brine and fear no 
evil consequences ; but when you came out 
you were coated with white salt from top to 
toe. And if you accidentally swallowed a 
mouthful of the water, you died. This is true, 
because I swallowed half a mouthful and was 
half-dead in consequence. 

The commercial traveler on our return 
journey across the level flats that fringe the 
lake's edge bade me note some of the customs 
of his people. The great open railway car 
held about a hundred men and maidens, 
11 coming up with a song from the sea." They 
sang and they shouted and they exchanged 
witticisms of the most poignant, and com- 
ported themselves like their brothers and sis- 



196 American Notes 

ters over the seas — the 'Arries and 'Arriets of 
the older world. And there sat behind me 
two modest maidens in white, alone and 
unattended. To these the privileged youth of 
the car — a youth of a marvelous range of 
voice — proffered undying affection. They 
laughed, but made no reply in words. The 
suit was renewed, and with extravagant im- 
agery ; the nearest seats applauding. When 
we arrived at the city the maidens turned and 
went their way up a dark tree-shaded street, 
and the boys elsewhere. Whereat, recollect- 
ing what the London rough was like, I mar- 
veled that they did not pursue. " It's all 
right," said the commercial traveler. " If 
they had followed — well, I guess some one 
would ha' shot 'em." The very next day on 
those very peaceful cars returning from the 
Lake some one was shot — dead. He was 
what they call a " sport," which is American 
for a finished " leg," and he had an argument 
with a police officer, and the latter slew him. 
I saw his funeral go down the main street. 
There were nearly thirty carriages, filled with 
doubtful men, and women not in the least 
doubtful, and the local papers said that de- 
ceased had his merits, but it didn't much 
matter, because if the Sheriff hadn't dropped 
him he would assuredly have dropped the 
Sheriff. Somehow this jarred on my sensitive 
feelings, and I went away, though the commer- 
cial traveler would fain have entertained me 



American Notes 197 

in his own house, he knowing not my name. 
Twice through the long hot nights we talked, 
tilting up our chairs on the sidewalk, of the 
future of America. 

You should hear the Saga of the States 
reeled off by a young and enthusiastic citizen 
who had just carved out for himself a home, 
filled it with a pretty little wife, and is prepar- 
ing to embark on commerce on his own 
account. I was tempted to believe that pistol- 
shots were regrettable accidents and lawless- 
ness only the top scum on the great sea of 
humanity. I am tempted to believe that still, 
though baked and dusty Utah is very many 
miles behind me. 

Then chance threw me into the arms of 
another and very different commercial trav- 
eler, as we pulled out of Utah on our way to 
Omaha via the Rockies. He traveled in 
biscuits, of which more anon, and Fate had 
smitten him very heavily, having at one stroke 
knocked all the beauty and joy out of his poor 
life. So he journeyed with a case of samples 
as one dazed, and his eyes took no pleasure 
in anything that he saw. In his despair he 
had withdrawn himself to his religion, — he 
was a Baptist, — and spoke of its consolation 
with the artless freedom that an American 
generally exhibits when he is talking about his 
most sacred private affairs. There was a 
desert beyond Utah, hot and barren as Mian 
Mir in May. The sun baked the car-roof, and 



198 American Notes 

the dust caked the windows, and through the 
dust and the glare the man with the biscuits 
bore witness to his creed, which seems to in- 
clude one of the greatest miracles in the world 
— the immediate unforeseen, self-conscious 
redemption of the soul by means very similar 
to those which turned Paul to the straight 
path. 

" You must experience religion," he repeated, 
his mouth twitching and his eyes black-ringed 
with his recent loss. "You must expenejice 
religion. You can't tell when you're goin' to 
get, or haow ; but it will come — it will come, 
Sir, like a lightning stroke, an' you will wrestle 
with yourself before you receive full conviction 
and assurance." 

" How long does that take ? " I asked rev- 
erently. 

" It may take hours. It may take days. I 
knew a man in San Jo who lay under convic- 
tion for a month an' the he ""ot the sperrit — 
as you must git it." 

" And then ? " 

" And then you are saved. You feel that, 
an' you kin endure anything," he sighed. 
" Yes, anything. I don't care what it is, though 
I allow that some things are harder than 
others." 

" Then you have to wait for the miracle to 
be worked by powers outside yourself. And 
if the miracle doesn't work ? " 

" But it must. I tell you it must. It comes 
to all who profess with faith." 



American Notes 199 

I learned a good deal about that creed as 
the train fled on ; and I wondered as I learned. 
It was a strange thing to watch that poor hu- 
man soul, broken and bowed by its loss, nerving 
itself against each new pang of pain with ihe 
iterated assurance that it was safe against the 
pains of Hell. 

The heat was stifling. We quitted the 
desert and launched into the rolling green 
plains of Colorado. Dozing uneasily with 
every removable rag removed, I was roused 
by a blast of intense cold and the drumming 
of a hundred drums. The train had stopped. 
Far as the eye could range the land was white 
under two feet of hail — each hailstone as big 
as the top of a sherry-glass. I saw a young 
colt by the side of the track standing with his 
poor little fluffy back to the pitiless pelting. 
He was pounded to death. An old horse met 
his doom on the run. He galloped wildly 
towards the train, but his hind legs dropped 
into a hole half water and half ice. He beat 
the ground with his fore-feet for a minute and 
then rolling over on his side submitted quietly 
to be killed. 

When the storm ceased, we picked our way 
cautiously and crippledly over a track that 
might give way at any moment. The Western 
driver urges his train much as does the Subal- 
tern the bounding pony, and 'twould seem 
with an equal sense of responsibility. If a 
foot does go wrong, why there you are, don't 



200 American Notes 

you know, and if it is all right, why all right 
it is, don't you know. But I would sooner be 
on the pony than the train. 

This seems a good place wherein to preach 
on American versatility. When Mr. Howells 
writes a novel, when a reckless hero dams a 
flood by heaving a dynamite-shattered moun- 
tain into it, or when a notoriety-hunting 
preacher marries a couple in a balloon, you 
shall hear the great American press rise on its 
hind legs and walk round mouthing over the 
versatility of the American citizen. And he 
is versatile — horribly so. The unlimited ex- 
ercise of the right of private judgment (which, 
by the way, is a weapon not one man in ten is 
competent to handle), his blatant cocksure- 
ness, and the dry-air-bred restlessness that 
makes him crawl all over the furniture when 
he is talking to you, conspire to make him 
versatile. But what he calls versatility the 
impartial bystander of Anglo-Indian extraction 
is apt to deem mere casualness, and dangerous 
casualness at that. No man can grasp the 
inwardness of an employ by the light of pure 
reason — even though that reason be republican. 
He must serve an apprenticeship to one craft 
and learn that craft all the days of his life if 
he wishes to excel therein. Otherwise he 
merely " puts the thing through somehow ; " 
and occasionally he doesn't. But wherein lies 
the beauty of this form of mental suppleness ? 
Old man California, whom I shall love and 



American Notes 201 

respect always, told me one or two anecdotes 
about American versatility and its conse- 
quences that came back to my mind with dire- 
ful force as the train progressed. We didn't 
upset, but I don't think that that was the 
fault of the driver or the men who made the 
track. Take up — you can easily find them — 
the accounts of ten consecutive railway catas- 
trophes — not little accidents, but first-class 
fatalities, when the long cars turn over, take 
fire, and roast the luckless occupants alive. 
To seven out of the ten you shall find appended 
the cheerful statement : " The accident is 
supposed to have been due the rails spreading." 
That means the metals were spiked down to 
the ties with such versatility that the spikes or 
the tracks drew under the constant vibration 
of the traffic, and the metals opened out. No 
one is hanged for these little affairs. 

We began to climb hills, and then w T e 
stopped— at night in darkness., while men 
threw sand under the wheels and crowbarred 
the track and then " guessed " that we might 
proceed. Not being in the least anxious to 
face my Maker half asleep and rubbing my 
eyes, I went forward to a common car, and 
was rewarded by two hours' conversation with 
the stranded, broken-down, husband-aban- 
doned actress of a fourth-rate, stranded, 
broken-down, manager-bereft company. She 
was muzzy with beer, reduced to her last 
dollar, fearful that there would be no one to 



202 American Notes 

meet her at Omaha, and wept at intervals be- 
cause she had given the conductor a five- 
dollar bill to change, and he hadn't come back. 
He was an Irishman, so I knew he couldn't 
steal, and I addressed myself to the task of 
consolation. I was rewarded, after a decent 
interval, by the history of a life so wild, so 
mixed, so desperately improbable, and yet so 
simply probable, and above all so quick — not 
fast — in its kaleidoscopic changes that the 
Pioneer would reject any summary of it. And 
so you will never know how she, the beery 
woman with the tangled blond hair, was once 
a girl on a farm in far-off New Jersey. 
How he, a traveling actor, had wooed and 
won her, — " but Paw he was always set 
against Alf," — and how he and she embarked 
all their little capital on the word of a faith- 
less manager who disbanded his company a 
hundred miles from nowhere, and how she 
and Alf and a third person who had not 
yet made any noise in the world, had to 
walk the railway-track and beg from the farm- 
houses ; how that third person arrived and 
went away again with a wail, and how Alf 
took to the whisky and other things still more 
calculated to make a wife unhappy ; and how 
after barn-stormings, insults, shooting-scrapes, 
and pitiful collapses of poor companies she 
had once won an encore. It was not a cheer- 
ful tale to listen to. There was a real ac- 
tress in the Pullman, — such an one as travels 



American Notes 203 

sumptuously with a maid and dressing-case, 
— and my draggle-tail thought of appealing to 
her for help, but broke down after several at- 
tempts to walk into the car jauntily as befitted 
a sister in the profession. Then the con- 
ductor reappeared, — the five-dollar bill hon- 
estly changed, — and she wept by reason of 
beer and gratitude together, and then fell 
asleep waveringly, alone in the car, and be- 
came almost beautiful and quite kissable ; 
while the Man with the Sorrow stood at 
the door between actress and actress and 
preached grim sermons on the certain end of 
each if they did not mend their ways and 
find regeneration through the miracle of the 
Baptist creed. Yes, we were a queer com- 
pany going up to the Rockies together. I 
was the luckiest, because when a breakdown 
occurred, and we were delayed for twelve 
hours, I ate all the Baptist's sample-biscuits. 
They were various in composition, but nour- 
ishing. Always travel with a " drummer." 



204 American Notes 



XIII. 

After much dallying and more climbing 
we came to a pass like all the Bolan Passes in 
the world, and the Black Canon of the Gun- 
nison called they it. We had been climbing 
for very many hours, and attained a modest 
elevation of some seven or eight thousand 
feet above the sea, when we entered a gorge, 
remote from the sun, where the rocks were 
two thousand feet sheer, and where a rock- 
splintered river roared and howled ten feet 
below a track which seemed to have been 
built on the simple principle of dropping mis- 
cellaneous dirt into the river and pinning a 
few rails a-top. There was a glory and a won- 
der and a mystery about that mad ride which 
I felt keenly (you will find it properly dressed 
up in the guide-books), until I had to offer 
prayers for the safety of the train. There 
was no hope of seeing the track two hundred 
yards ahead. We seemed to be running into 
the bowels of the earth at the invitation of an 
irresponsible stream. Then the solid rock 
would open and disclose a curve of awful 
twistfulness. Then the driver put on all 
steam, and we would go round that curve on 
one wheel chiefly, the Gunnison River gnash- 
ing its teeth below. The cars overhung the 



American Notes 205 

edge of the water, and if a single one of the 
rails had chosen to spread, nothing in the 
wide world could have saved us from drown- 
ing. I knew we should damage something in 
the end — the somber horrors of the gorge, the 
rush of the jade-green water below, and the 
cheerful tales told by the conductor made me 
certain of the catastrophe. 

We had just cleared the Black Canon and 
another gorge, and were sailing out into open 
country nine thousand feet above the level of 
the sea, when we came most suddenly round 
a corner upon a causeway across a waste 
water — half dam and half quarry-pool. The 
locomotive gave one wild " Hoo ! Hoo ! 
Hoo ! " but it was too late. He was a beauti- 
ful bull, and goodness only knows why he had 
chosen the track for a constitutional with his 
wife. She was flung to the left, but the cow- 
catcher caught him, and turning him round, 
heaved him shoulder deep into the pool. The 
expression of blank, blind bewilderment on 
his bovine, jovine face was wonderful to be- 
hold. He was not angry. I don't think he 
was even scared, though he must have flown 
ten yards through the air. All he wanted to 
know was : " Will somebody have the good- 
ness to tell a respectable old gentleman what 
in the world, or out of it, has occurred ? " 
And five minutes later the stream that had 
been snapping at our heels in the gorges split 
itself into a dozen silver threads on a breezy 



206 American Notes 

upland, and became an innocent trout beck, 
and we halted at a half-dead city, the name of 
which does not remain with me. It had 
originally been built on the crest of a wave of 
prosperity. Once ten thousand people had 
walked its street ; but the boom had collapsed. 
The great brick houses and the factories were 
empty. The population lived in little timber 
shanties on the fringes of the deserted town. 
There were some railway workshops and 
things, and the hotel (whose pavement formed 
the platform of the railway) contained one 
hundred and more rooms — empty. The 
place, in its half-inhabitedness, was more 
desolate than Amber or Chitor. But a man 
said : " Trout — six pounds — two miles away," 
and the Sorrowful Man and myself went in 
search of 'em. The town was ringed by a 
circle of hills all alive with little thunder- 
storms that broke across the soft green of the 
plain in wisps and washes of smoke and 
amber. 

To our tiny party associated himself a 
lawyer from Chicago. We foregathered on 
the question of flies, but I didn't expect to 
meet Elijah Pogram in the flesh. He de- 
livered orations on the future of England and 
America, and of the Great Federation that 
the years will bring forth when America and 
England will belt the globe with their linked 
hands. According to the notions of the 
British, he made an ass of himself, but for all 



American Notes 207 

his high-falutin he talked sense. I might 
knock through England on a four months' 
tour and not find a man capable of putting 
into words the passionate patriotism that 
possessed the little Chicago lawyer. And he 
was a man with points, for he offered me 
three days' shooting in Illinois, if I would 
step out of my path a little. I might travel 
for ten years up and down England ere I 
found a man who would give a complete 
stranger so much as a sandwich, and for 
twenty ere I squeezed as much enthusiasm 
out of a Britisher. He and I talked politics 
and trout-flies all one sultry day as we wan- 
dered up and down the shallows of the stream 
aforesaid. Little fish are sweet. I spent 
two hours whipping a ripple for a fish that I 
knew was there, and in the pasture-scented 
dusk caught a three-pounder on a ragged old 
brown hackle and landed him after ten min- 
utes' excited argument. He was a beauty. 
If ever any man works the Western trout- 
streams, he would do well to bring out with 
him the dingiest flies he possesses. The na- 
tives laugh at the tiny English hooks, but they 
hold, and duns and drabs and sober grays 
seem to tickle the aesthetic tastes of the trout. 
For salmon (but don't say that I told you) 
use the spoon — gold on one side, silver on the 
other. It is as killing as is a similar article with 
fish of another calibre. The natives seem to 
use much too coarse tackle. 



208 American Notes 

It was a search for a small boy who should 
know the river that revealed to me a new 
phase of life — slack, slovenly, and shiftless, 
but very interesting. There was a family in 
a packing-case hut on the outskirts of the 
town. They had seen the city when it was on 
the boom and made pretense of being the 
metropolis of the Rockies ; and when the 
boom was over, they did not go. She was 
affable, but deeply coated with dirt ; he was 
grim and grimy, and the little children were 
simply caked with filth of various descriptions. 
But they lived in a certain sort of squalid 
luxury, six or eight of them in two rooms ; 
and they enjoyed the local society. It was 
their eight-year-old son whom I tried to take 
out with me, but he had been catching trout 
all his life and " guessed he didn't feel like 
coming," though I proffered him six shillings 
for what ought to have been a day's pleasuring. 
" I'll stay with Maw," he Said, and from that 
attitude I could not move him. Maw didn't 
attempt to argue with him. " If he says he 
won't come, he won't," she said, as though 
he were one of the elemental forces of nature 
instead of a spankable brat ; and " Paw," 
lounging by the store, refused to interfere. 
Maw told me that she had been a school- 
teacher in her not-so-distant youth, but did 
not tell me what I was dying to know — how 
she arrived at this mucky tenement at the 
back of beyond, and why. Though preserv- 



American Notes 209 

ing the prettiness of her New England speech, 
she had come to regard washing as a luxury. 
Paw chewed tobacco and spat from time to 
time. Yet, when he opened his mouth for 
other purposes, he spoke like a well-educated 
man. There was a story there, but I couldn't 
get at it. 

Next day the Man with the Sorrow and 
myself and a few others began the real ascent 
of the Rockies ; up to that time our climbing 
didn't count. The train ran violently up a 
steep place and was taken to pieces. Five 
cars were hitched on to two locomotives, and 
two cars to one locomotive. This seemed to 
be a kind and thoughtful act, but I was idiot 
enough to go forward and watch the coupling- 
on of the two rear cars in which Caesar and 
his fortunes were to travel. Some one had lost 
or eaten the regularly ordained coupling, and a 
man picked up from the tailboard of the engine 
a single iron link about as thick as a fetter- 
link watch-chain, and "guessed it would do." 
Get hauled up a Simla cliff by the hook of a 
lady's parasol if you wish to appreciate my 
sentiments when the cars moved uphill and 
the link drew tight. Miles away and two . 
thousand feet above our heads rose the 
shoulder of a hill epauletted with the long line 
of a snow-tunnel. The first section of the 
cars crawled a quarter of a mile ahead of us, 
the track snaked and looped behind, and 
there was a black drop to the left. So we 
H 



210 American Notes 

went up and up and up till the thin air grew 
thinner and the chunk-chunk-chunk of the 
laboring locomotive was answered by the 
oppressed beating of the exhausted heart. 
Through the checked light and shade of the 
snow tunnels (horrible caverns of rude tim- 
bering) we ground our way, halting now and 
again to allow a down-train to pass. One 
monster of forty mineral cars slid past, scarce 
held by four locomotives, their brakes scream- 
ing and chortling in chorus ; and in the end, 
after a glimpse at half America spread map- 
wise leagues below us, we halted at the head 
of the longest snow tunnel of all, on the crest 
of the divide, between ten and eleven thou- 
sand feet above the level of the sea. The 
locomotive wished to draw breath, and the 
passengers to gather the flowers that nodded 
impertinently through the chinks of the board- 
ing. A lady passenger's nose began to bleed, 
and other ladies threw themselves down on 
the seats and gasped with the gasping train, 
while a wind as keen as a knife-edge rioted 
down the grimy tunnel. 

Then, despatching a pilot-engine to clear 
the way, we began the downward portion of 
the journey with every available brake on, 
and frequent shrieks, till after some hours we 
reached the level plain, and later the city of 
Denver, where the Man with the Sorrow went 
his way and left me to journey on to Omaha 
alone, after one hasty glance at Denver. The 



American Notes 211 

pulse of that town was too like the rushing 
mighty wind in the Rocky Mountain tunnel. 
It made me tired because complete strangers 
desired me to do something to mines which 
were in mountains, and to purchase building 
blocks upon inaccessible cliffs ; and once, a 
woman urged that I should supply her with 
strong drinks. I had almost forgotten that 
such attacks were possible in any land, for 
the outward and visible signs of public mor- 
ality in American towns are generally safe- 
guarded. For that I respect this people. 
Omaha, Nebraska, was but a halting-place on 
the road to Chicago, but it revealed to me 
horrors that I would not willingly have missed. 
The city to casual investigation seemed to be 
populated entirely by Germans, Poles, Slavs, 
Hungarians, Croats, Magyars, and all the 
scum of the Eastern European States, but it 
must have been laid out by Americans. No 
other people would cut the traffic of a main 
street with two streams of railway lines, each 
some eight or nine tracks wide, and cheer- 
fully drive tram-cars across the metals. Every 
now and again they have horrible railway 
crossing accidents at Omaha, but nobody 
seems to think of building an overhead- 
bridge. That would interfere with the vested 
interests of the undertakers. 

Be blessed to hear some details of one of 
that class. 

There was a shop the like of which I had 



212 American Notes 

never seen before : its windows were filled 
with dress-coats for men, and dresses for 
women. But the studs of the shirts were 
made of stamped cloth upon the shirt front, 
and there were no trousers to those coats — 
nothing but a sweep of cheap black cloth 
falling like an abbe's frock. In the doorway 
sat a young man reading Pollock's Course of 
Time, and by that I knew that he was an 
undertaker. His name was Gring, which is a 
beautiful name, and I talked to him on the mys- 
teries of his Craft. He was an enthusiast and 
an artist. I told him how corpses were burnt 
in India. Said he : " We're vastly superior. 
We hold — that is to say, embalm — our dead. 
So ! " Whereupon he produced the horrible 
weapons of his trade, and most practically 
showed me how you " held " a man back from 
that corruption which is his birthright. " And 
I wish I could live a few generations just to 
see how my people keep. But I'm sure it's 
all right. Nothing can touch 'em after /'ve 
embalmed 'em." Then he displayed one of 
those ghastly dress-suits, and when I laid a 
shuddering hand upon it, behold it crumpled 
to nothing, for the white linen was sewn on to 
the black cloth and — there was no back to it ! 
That was the horror. The garment was a 
shell. " We dress a man in that," said Gring, 
laying it out tastily on the counter. " As you 
see here, our caskets have a plate-glass win- 
dow in front " (Oh me, but that window in 



American Notes 213 

the coffin was fitted with plush like a brough- 
am-window !), " and you don't see anything 
below the level of the man's waistcoat. Con- 
sequently. . . ." He unrolled the terrible 
cheap black cloth that falls down over the 
stark feet, and I jumped back. " Of course 
a man can be dressed in his own clothes if he 
likes, but these are the regular things : and 
for women look at this ! " He took up the 
body of a high-necked dinner-dress in sub- 
dued lilac, slashed and puffed and bedeviled 
with black, but, like the dress-suit, backless, 
and below the waist turning to shroud. 
" That's for an old maid. But for a young 
girl we give white with imitation pearls round 
the neck. That looks very pretty through 
the window of the casket — you see there's a 
cushion for the head — with flowers banked all 
round.'' Can you imagine anything more 
awful than to take your last rest as much of a 
dead fraud as ever you were a living lie — to 
go into the darkness one-half of you shaved, 
trimmed and dressed for an evening party, 
while the other half — the half that your friends 
cannot see — is enwrapped in a flapping black 
sheet ? 

I know a little about burial customs in 
various places in the world, and I tried hard 
to make Mr. Gring comprehend dimly the 
awful heathendom that he was responsible for 
— the grotesquerie — the giggling horror of it 
all. But he couldn't see it. Even when he 



214 American Notes 

showed me a little boy's last suit, he 
couldn't see it. He said it was quite 
right to embalm and trick out and hypo- 
critically bedizen the poor innocent dead in 
their superior cushioned and pillowed caskets 
with the window in front. 

Bury me cased in canvas like a fishing-rod, 
in the deep sea ; burn me on a back-water of 
the Hugli with damp wood and no oil ; pin 
me under a Pullman car and let the lighted 
stove do its worst ; sizzle me with a fallen 
electric wire or whelm me in the sludge of a 
broken river dam ; but may I never go down 
to the Pit grinning out of a plate-glass win- 
dow, in a backless dress-coat, and the front 
half of a black stuff dressing-gown ; not 
though I were " held " against the ravage of 
the grave for ever and ever. Amen ! 



American Notes 215 



XIV. 

" I know thy cunning and thy greed, 
Thy hard, high lust and wilful deed, 
And all thy glory loves to tell 
Of specious gifts material." 

I have struck a city, — a real city, — and they 
call it Chicago. The other places do not 
count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort 
as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phe- 
nomenon. This place is the first American 
city I have encountered. It holds rather 
more than a million people with bodies, and 
stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. 
Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see 
it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its 
water is the water of the Hugh, and its air is 
dirt. Also it says that it is the " boss " town 
of America. 

I do not believe that it has anything to do 
with this country. They told me to go to the 
Palmer House, which is a gilded and mirrored 
rabbit-warren, and there I found a huge hall 
of tessellated marble, crammed with people 
talking about money and spitting about every- 
where. Other barbarians charged in and out 
of this inferno with letters and telegrams in 
their hands, and yet others shouted at each 
other. A man who had drunk quite as much 



216 American Notes 

as was good for him told me that this was 
" the finest hotel in the finest city on God Al- 
mighty's earth." By the way, when an 
American wishes to indicate the next county 
or State he says, " God A'mighty's earth." 
This prevents discussion and flatters his 
vanity. 

Then I went out into the streets, which are 
long and flat and without end. And verily it 
is not a good thing to live in the East for any 
length of time. Your ideas grow to clash 
with those held by every right-thinking white 
man. I looked down interminable vistas 
flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen storied 
houses, and crowded with men and women, 
and the show impressed me with a great hor- 
ror. Except in London — and I have forgot- 
ten what London is like — I had never seen so 
many white people together, and never such a 
collection of miserables. There was no color 
in the street and no beauty — only a maze of 
wire-ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging 
underfoot. A cab-driver volunteered to show 
me the glory of the town for so much an hour, 
and with him I wandered far. He conceived 
that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to 
be reverently admired ; that it was good to 
huddle men together in fifteen layers, one 
atop of the other, and to dig holes in the 
ground for offices. He said that Chicago 
was a live town, and that all the creatures 
hurrying by me were engaged in business. 



American Notes 217 

That is to say, they were trying to make 
some money, that they might not die 
through lack of food to put into their bel- 
lies. He took me to canals, black as ink, 
and filled with untold abominations, and bade 
me watch the stream of traffic across the 
bridges. He then took me into a saloon, and, 
while I drank, made me note that the floor was 
covered with coins sunk into cement. A 
Hottentot would not have been guilty of this 
sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect 
pretty enough, but the man who put them 
there had no thought to beauty, and therefore 
he was a savage. Then my cab-driver showed 
me business-blocks, gay with signs and studded 
with fantastic and absurd advertisements of 
goods, and looking down the long street so 
adorned it was as though each vender stood 
at his door howling : " For the sake of money, 
employ or buy of me and me only ! " Have 
you ever seen a crowd at our famine relief 
distributions ? You know then how men leap 
into the air, stretching out their arms above 
the crowd in the hope of being seen ; while 
the women dolorously slap the stomachs of 
their children and whimper. I had sooner 
watch famine-relief than the white man en- 
gaged in what he calls legitimate competition. 
The one I understand. The other makes me 
ill. And the cabman said that these things 
were the proof of progress ; and by that I 
knew he had been reading his newspaper, 



218 American Notes 

as every intelligent American should. The 
papers tell their readers in language fitted to 
their comprehension that the snarling together 
of telegraph wires, the heaving up of houses, 
and the making of money is progress. 

I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, 
wandering through scores of miles of these 
terrible streets, and jostling some few hundred 
thousand of these terrible people who talked 
money through their noses. The cabman left 
me : but after a while I picked up another man 
who was full of figures, and into my ears he 
poured them as occasion required or the big 
blank factories suggested. Here they turned 
out so many hundred thousand dollars' worth 
of such and such an article ; there so many 
million other things ; this house was worth so 
many million dollars ; that one so many mil- 
lion more or less. It was like listening to a 
child babbling of its hoard of shells. It was 
like watching a fool playing with buttons. But 
I was expected to do more than listen or 
watch. He demanded that I should admire ; 
and the utmost that I could say was : " Are 
these things so ? Then I am very sorry for 
you." That made him angry, and he said 
that insular envy made me unresponsive. So 
you see I could not make him understand. 

About four and a half hours after Adam was 
turned out of the garden of Eden he felt hun- 
gry, and so, bidding Eve take care that her 
head was not broken by the descending fruit, 



American Notes 219 

shinned up a cocoanut palm. That hurt his 
legs, cut his breast, and made him breathe 
heavily, and Eve was tormented with fear lest 
her lord should miss his footing and so bring 
the tragedy of this world to an end ere the 
curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam 
then, I should have been sorry for him. To- 
day I find eleven hundred thousand of his 
sons just as far advanced as their father in the 
art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior 
to him in that they think that their palm-trees 
lead straight to the skies. Consequently I am 
sorry in rather more than a million different 
ways. In our East bread comes naturally 
even to the poorest by a little scratching or 
the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In less 
favored countries one is apt to forget. Then 
I went to bed. And that was on a Saturday 
night. 

Sunday brought me the queerest experience 
of all — a revelation of barbarism complete. I 
found a place that was officially described as 
a church. It was a circus really, but that the 
worshipers did not know. There were flow- 
ers all about the building, which was fitted up 
with plush and stained oak and much luxury, 
including twisted brass candlesticks of severest 
Gothic design. To these things, and a con- 
gregation of savages, entered suddenly a 
wonderful man completely in the confidence of 
their God, whom he treated colloquially and 
exploited very much as a newspaper reporter 



220 American Notes 

would exploit a foreign potentate. But, un- 
like the newspaper reporter, he never allowed 
his listeners to forget that he and not He was 
the center of attraction. With a voice of silver 
and with imagery borrowed from the auction- 
room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on 
the lines of the Palmer House (but with all 
the gilding real gold and all the plate-glass 
diamond) and set in the center of it a loud- 
voiced, argumentative, and very shrewd crea- 
tion that he called God. One sentence at this 
point caught my delighted ear. It was apro- 
pos of some question of the Judgment Day and 
ran : " No ! I tell you God doesn't do business 
that way." He was giving them a deity whom 
they could comprehend, in a gold and jewel 
heaven in which they could take a natural in- 
terest. He interlarded his performance with 
the slang of the streets, the counter, and the 
Exchange, and he said that religion ought to 
enter into daily life. Consequently I presume 
he introduced it as daily life — his own and the 
life of his friends. 

Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring 
no benediction at such hands. But the per- 
sons who listened seemed to enjoy themselves, 
and I understood that I had met with a popu- 
lar preacher. Later on when I had perused 
the sermons of a gentleman called Talmage 
and some others, I perceived that I had been 
listening to a very mild specimen. Yet that 
man, with his brutal gold and silver idols, his 



American Notes. 221 

hands-in-pocket, cigar-in-mouth, and hat-on- 
the-back-of-the-head style of dealing with the 
sacred vessels would count himself spiritually 
quite competent to send a mission to convert 
the Indians. All that Sunday I listened to 
people who said that the mere fact of spiking 
down strips of iron to wood and getting a 
steam and iron thing to run along them was 
progress. That the telephone was progress, 
and the network of wires overhead was prog- 
ress. They repeated their statements again 
and again. One of them took me to their 
city hall and board of trade works and pointed 
it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very 
big, and the streets in front of it were narrow 
and unclean. When I saw the faces of the 
men who did business in that building I felt 
that there had been a mistake in their billet- 
ing. 

By the way, 'tis a consolation to feel that I 
am not writing to an English audience. Then 
should I have to fall into feigned ecstasies 
over the marvelous progress of Chicago since 
the days of the great fire, to allude casually to 
the raising of the entire city so many feet 
above the level of the lake which it faces, and 
generally to grovel before the golden calf. 
But you, who are desperately poor, and there- 
fore by these standards of no account, know 
things, and will understand when I write that 
they have managed to get a million of men 
together on flat land, and that the bulk of 



222 American Notes 

these men appear to be lower than mahajans 
and not so companionable as a punjabi/#/ 
after harvest. But I don't think it was the 
blind hurry of the people, their argot, and their 
grand ignorance of things beyond their imme- 
diate interests that displeased me so much as 
a study of the daily papers of Chicago. Im- 
primis, there was some sort of dispute between 
New York and Chicago as to which town 
should give an exhibition of products to be 
hereafter holden, and through the medium of 
their more dignified journals the two cities 
were ya-hooing and hi-yi-ing at each other like 
opposition newsboys. They called it humor, 
but it sounded like something quite different. 
That was only the first trouble. The second 
lay in the tone of the productions. Leading 
articles which include gems such as : " Back 
of such and such a place," or " We noticed, 
Tuesday, such an event," or " don't " for 
" does not " are things to be accepted with 
thankfulness. All that made me want to cry 
was that, in these papers, were faithfully re- 
produced all the war-cries and " back-talk " of 
the Palmer House bar, the slang of the bar- 
bers' shops, the mental elevation and integrity 
of the Pullman-car porter, the dignity of the 
Dime Museum, and the accuracy of the ex- 
cited fishwife. I am sternly forbidden to be- 
lieve that the paper educates the public ? 
Just when the sense of unreality and op- 



American Notes 223 

pression were strongest upon me, and when I 
most wanted help, a man sat at my side and 
began to talk what he called politics. I had 
chanced to pay about six shillings for a 
traveling-cap worth eighteen pence, and he 
made of the fact a text for a sermon. He said 
that this was a rich country and that the peo- 
ple liked to pay two hundred per cent, on the 
value of a thing. They could afford it. He 
said that the Government imposed a protective 
duty of from ten to seventy per cent, on foreign- 
made articles, and that the American manu- 
facturer consequently could sell his goods for 
a healthy sum. Thus an imported hat would, 
with duty, cost two guineas. The American 
manufacturer would make a hat for seventeen 
shillings and sell it for one pound fifteen. In 
these things, he said, lay the greatness of 
America and the effeteness of England. 
Competition between factory and factory kept 
the prices down to decent limits, but I was 
never to forget that this people were a rich 
people, not like the pauper Continentals, and 
that they enjoyed paying duties. To my weak 
intellect this seemed rather like juggling with 
counters. Everything that I have yet pur- 
chased costs about twice as much as it would 
in England, and when native-made is of inferior 
quality. Moreover, since these lines were 
first thought of I have visited a gentleman 
who owned a factory which used to produce 
things. He owned the factory still. Not a 



224 American Notes 

man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome 
income from a syndicate of firms for keeping 
it closed in order that it might not produce 
things. This man said that if protection were 
abandoned, a tide of pauper labor would 
flood the country, and as I looked at his 
factory I thought how entirely better it was to 
have no labor of any kind whatever, rather 
than face so horrible a future. Meantime, do 
you remember that this peculiar country enjoys 
paying money for value not received. I am 
an alien, and for the life of me cannot see 
why six shillings should be paid for eighteen- 
penny caps, or eight shillings for half-crown 
cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a 
decently populated level a few million people 
who are not aliens will be smitten with the 
same sort of blindness. 

But my friend's assertion somehow 
thoroughly suited the grotesque ferocity of 
Chicago. See now and judge ! In the village 
of Isser Jang on the road to Montgomery 
there be four changar women who winnow 
corn — some seventy bushels a year. Beyond 
their hut lives Puran Dass, the money-lender, 
who on good security lends as much as five 
thousand rupees in a year. Jowala Singh, 
the lohar> mends the village plow — some 
thirty, broken at the share, in three hundred 
and sixty-five days ; and Hukm Chund, who 
is letter-writer and head of the little club under 
the travelers' tree, generally keeps the village 



American Notes 225 

posted in such gossip as the barber and the 
midwife have not yet made public property. 
Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the 
million bushels, a hundred banks lend hun- 
dreds of millions of dollars in the year, and 
scores of factories turn out plow gear and 
machinery by steam. Scores of daily papers 
do work which Hukm Chund and the barber 
and the midwife perform, with due regard fci 
public opinion, in the village of Isser Jang. 
So far as manufactures go, the difference be- 
tween Chicago on the lake and Isser Jang on 
the Montgomery road is one of degree only, 
and not of kind. As far as the understanding 
of the uses of life goes Isser Jang, for all its 
seasonal cholera, has the advantage over 
Chicago. Jowala Singh knows and takes care 
to avoid the three or four ghoul-haunted fields 
on the outskirts of the village ; but he is not 
urged by millions of devils to run about all day 
in the sun and swear that his plowshares 
are the best in the Punjab ; nor does Puran 
Dass fly forth in a cart more than once or 
twice a year, and he knows, on a pinch, how 
to use the railway and the telegraph as well as 
any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is 
absurd. The East is not the West, and these 
men must continue to deal with the machinery 
of life, and to call it progress. Their very 
preachers dare not rebuke them. They gloss 
over the hunting for money and the twice- 
sharpened bitterness of Adam's curse by saying 

*5 



226 American Notes 

that such things dower a man with a larger 
range of thoughts and higher aspirations. 
They do not say : " Free yourself from your 
own slavery," but rather, " If you can possibly 
manage it, do not set quite so much store 
on the things of this world." And they 
do not know what the things of this world 
are. 

I went off to see cattle killed by way of 
clearing my head, which, as you will perceive, 
was getting muddled. They say every 
Englishman goes to the Chicago stock-yards. 
You shall find them about six miles from the 
city ; and once having seen them will never 
forget the sight. As far as the eye can reach 
stretches a township of cattle-pens, cunningly 
divided into blocks so that the animals of any 
pen can be speedily driven out close to an 
inclined timber path which leads to an elevated 
covered way straddling high above the pens. 
These viaducts are two-storied. On the upper 
story tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly for 
the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling 
of sharp hooves and multitudinous yells, run 
the pigs. The same end is appointed for each. 
Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting 
their turn — as they wait sometimes for days ; 
and they need not be distressed by the sight 
of their fellows running about in the fear of 
death. All they know is that a man on horse- 
back causes their next-door neighbors to 
move by means of a whip. Certain bars and 



American Notes 227 

fences are unshipped, and, behold, that crowd 
have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel 
and return no more. It is different with the 
pigs. They shriek back the news of the 
exodus to their friends, and a hundred pens 
skirl responsive. It was to the pigs I first 
addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which 
was full of them, as I could hear though I 
could not see, I marked a somber building 
whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed 
by stray cattle who had managed to escape 
from their proper quarters. A pleasant smell 
of brine warned me of what was coming. I 
entered the factory and found it full of pork 
in barrels, and on another story more pork 
unbarreled, and in a huge room, the halves of 
swine for whose use great lumps of ice 
were being pitched in at the window. That 
room was the mortuary chamber where the 
pigs lie for a little while in state ere they be- 
gin their progress through such passages as 
kings may sometimes travel. Turning a 
corner and not noting an overhead arrange- 
ment of greased rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran 
into the arms of four eviscerated carcasses, all 
pure white and of a human aspect, being 
pushed by a man clad in vehement red. 
When I leaped aside, the floor was slippery 
under me. There was a flavor of farmyard in 
my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in 
my ears. But there was no joy in that shout- 
ins:. Twelve men stood in two lines — six 



228 American Notes 

aside. Between them and overhead ran the 
railway of death that had nearly shunted me 
through the window. Each man carried a 
knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off 
at the elbows, and from bosom to heel he was 
blood-red. The atmosphere was stifling as a 
night in the Rains, by reason of the steam and 
the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of 
things and, perched upon a narrow beam, 
overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred 
in Wisconsin. They had just been shot out 
of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled to- 
gether in a large pen. Thence they were 
flicked persuasively, a few at the time, into a 
smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle 
on their hinder legs so that they rose in the 
air suspended from the railway of death. Oh ! 
it was then they shrieked and called on their 
mothers and made promises of amendment, 
till the tackle-man punted them in their backs, 
and they slid head down into a brick-floored 
passage, very like a big kitchen sink that was 
blood-red. There awaited them a red man 
with a knife which he passed jauntily through 
their throats, and the full-voiced shriek be- 
came a sputter, and then a fall as of heavy 
tropical rain. The red man who was backed 
against the passage wall stood clear of the 
wildly kicking hoofs and passed his hand over 
his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, 
but because the spurted blood was in his eyes 
and he had barely time to stick the next 



American Notes 229 

arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, 
still kicking, into a great vat of boiling water, 
and spoke no more words, but wallowed in 
obedience to some unseen machinery, and 
presently came forth at the lower end of the 
vat and was heaved on the blades of a blunt 
paddle-wheel-thing which said, " Hough ! 
Hough ! Hough ! " and skelped all the hair 
off him except what little a couple of men 
with knives could remove. Then he was 
again hitched by the heels to that said rail- 
way and passed down the line of the twelve 
men — each man with a knife — leaving with 
each man a certain amount of his individual- 
ity which was taken away in a wheelbarrow, 
and when he reached the last man he was 
very beautiful to behold, but immensely un- 
stuffed and limp. Preponderance of individ- 
uality was ever a bar to foreign travel. That 
pig could have been in no case to visit you in 
India had he not parted with some of his 
most cherished notions. 

The dissecting part impressed me not so 
mech as the slaying. They were so excess- 
ively alive, these pigs. And then they were 
so excessively dead, and the man in the drip- 
ping, clammy, hot passage did not seem to 
care, and ere the blood of such an one had 
ceased to foam on the floor, such another, and 
four friends with him, had shrieked and died. 
But a pig is only the Unclean animal — for- 
bidden by the Prophet. 



230 American Notes 

I was destined to make rather a queer dis- 
covery when I went over to the cattle- 
slaughter. All the buildings here were on a 
much larger scale, and there was no sound of 
trouble, but I could smell the salt reek of 
blood before I set foot in the place. The 
cattle did not come directly through the via- 
duct as the pigs had done. They debouched 
into a yard by the hundred, and they were 
big red brutes carrying much flesh. In the 
center of that yard stood a red Texan steer 
with a headstall on his wicked head. No 
man controlled him. He was, so to speak, 
picking his teeth and whistling in an open 
byre of his own when the cattle arrived. As 
soon as the first one had fearfully quitted the 
viaduct, this red devil put his hands in his 
pockets and slouched across the yard, no man 
guiding him. Then he lowed something to 
the effect that he was the regularly appointed 
guide of the establishment and would show 
them round. They were country folk, but 
they knew how to behave ; and so followed 
Judas some hundred strong, patiently, and 
with a look of bland wonder in their faces. I 
saw his broad back jogging in advance of 
them, up a lime-washed incline where I was 
forbidden to follow. Then a door shut, and 
in a minute back came Judas with the air of 
a virtuous plow-bullock and took up his 
place in his byre. Somebody laughed across 
the yard, but I heard no sound of cattle from 



American Notes 231 

the big brick building into which the mob had 
disappeared. Only Judas chewed the cud 
with a malignant satisfaction, and so I knew 
there was trouble, and ran round to the front 
of the factory and so entered and stood 
aghast. 

Who takes count of the prejudices which we 
absorb through the skin by way of our sur- 
roundings ? It was not the spectacle that im- 
pressed me. The first thought that almost 
spoke itself aloud was : " They are killing 
kine ; " and it was a shock. The pigs were 
nobody's concern, but cattle — the brothers of 
the Cow, the Sacred Cow — were quite other- 
wise. The next time an M. P. tells me that 
India either Sultanzies or Brahminizes a man, 
I shall believe about half what he says. It is 
unpleasant to watch the slaughter of cattle 
when one has laughed at the notion for a few 
years. I could not see actually what was done 
in the first instance, because the row of stalls 
in which they lay was separated from me by 
fifty impassable feet of butchers and slung 
carcasses. All I know is that men swung 
open the doors of a stall as occasion re- 
quired, and there lay two steers already 
stunned, and breathing heavily. These two 
they pole-axed, and half raising them by tackle 
they cut their throats. Two men skinned 
each carcass, somebody cut off the head, and 
in half a minute more the overhead rail car- 
ried two sides of beef to their appointed place. 



232 American Notes 

There was Ciamor enough in the operating 
room, but from the waiting cattle, invisible on 
the other side of the line of pens, never a 
sound. They went to their death, trusting 
Judas, without a word. They were slain at 
the rate of five a minute, and if the pig men 
were spattered with blood, the cow butchers 
were bathed in it. The blood ran in mutter- 
ing gutters. There was no place for hand or 
foot that was not coated with thicknesses of 
dried blood, and the stench of it in the nos- 
trils bred fear. 

And then the same merciful Providence 
that has showered goods things on my path 
throughout sent me an embodiment of the 
city of Chicago, so that I might remember it 
forever. Women come sometimes to see the 
slaughter, as they would come to see the 
slaughter of men. And there entered that 
vermilion hall a young woman of large mold, 
with brilliantly scarlet lips, and heavy eye- 
brows, and dark hair that came in a " widow's 
peak " on the forehead. She was well and 
healthy and alive, and she was dressed in 
flaming red and black, and her feet (know 
you that the feet of American women are like 
unto the feet of fairies ?) her feet, I say, were 
cased in red leather shoes. She stood in a 
patch of sunlight, the red blood under her 
shoes, the vivid carcasses tacked round her, a 
bullock bleeding its life away not six feet 
away from her, and the death factory roaring 



American Notes 233 

all round her. She looked curiously, with 
hard, bold eyes, and was not ashamed. 

Then said I : " This is a special Sending. 
I have seen the City of Chicago." And I 
went away to get peace and rest. 



234 American Notes 



xv. 

It is a mean thing and an unhandsome to 
" do " a continent in five-hundred-mile jumps. 
But after those swine and bullocks at Chicago 
I felt that complete change of air would be 
good. The United States at present hinge in 
or about Chicago, as a double-leaved screen 
hinges. To be sure, the tiny New England 
States call a trip to Pennsylvania "going 
west," but the larger-minded citizen seems to 
reckon his longitude from Chicago. Twenty 
years hence the center of population — that 
shaded square on the census map — will have 
shifted, men say, far west of Chicago. 
Twenty years later it will be on the Pacific 
slope. Twenty years after that America will 
begin to crowd up, and there will be some 
trouble. People will demand manufactured 
goods for their reduced-establishment house- 
holds at the cheapest possible rates, and the 
cry that the land is rich enough to afford pro- 
tection will cease with a great abruptness. 
At present it is the farmer who pays most 
dearly for the luxury of high prices. In the 
old days, when the land was fresh and there 
was plenty of it and it cropped like the garden 
of Eden, he did not mind paying. Now there 
is not so much free land, and the old acres 



American Notes 235 

are needing stimulants, which cost money, 
and the farmer, who pays for everything, is 
beginning to ask questions. Also the great 
American nation, which individually never 
shuts a door behind its noble self, very sel- 
dom attempts to put back anything that it 
has taken from Nature's shelves. It grabs 
all it can and moves on. But the moving-on 
is nearly finished and the grabbing must 
stop, and then the Federal Government will 
have to establish a Woods and Forests De- 
partment the like of which was never seen in 
the world before. And all the people who 
have been accustomed to hack, mangle, and 
burn timber as they please will object, with 
shots and protestations, to this infringement 
of their rights. The nigger will breed boun- 
teously, and he will have to be reckoned with ; 
and the manufacturer will have to be con- 
tented with smaller profits, and he will have 
to be reckoned with ; and the railways will 
no longer rule the countries through which 
they run, and they will have to be reckoned 
with. And nobody will approve of it in the 
least. 

Yes ; it will be a spectacle for all the world 
to watch, this big, slashing colt of a nation, 
that has got off with a flying start on a freshly 
littered course, being pulled back to the ruck 
by that very mutton-fisted jockey Necessity. 
There will be excitement in America when a 
few score millions of " sovereigns " discover 



236 American Notes 

that what they considered the outcome of 
their own Government is but the rapidly di- 
minishing bounty of Nature ; and that if they 
want to get on comfortably they must tackle 
every single problem from labor to finance 
humbly, without gasconade, and afresh. But 
at present they look " that all the to-morrows 
shall be as to-day," and if you argue with 
them they say that the Democratic Idea will 
keep things going. They believe in that 
Idea, and the less well-informed fortify them- 
selves in their belief by curious assertions as 
to the despotism that exists in England. This 
is pure provincialism, of course ; but it is 
very funny to listen to, especially when you 
compare the theory with the practise (pistol, 
chiefly) as proven in the newspapers. I 
have striven to find out where the central 
authority of the land lies. It isn't at Wash- 
ington, because the Federal Government can't 
do anything to the States save run the mail 
and collect a Federal tax or two. It isn't in 
the States, because the townships can do as 
they like ; and it isn't in the townships, be- 
cause these are bossed by alien voters or 
rings of patriotic homebred citizens. And it 
certainly is not in the citizens, because they 
are governed and coerced by despotic power 
of public opinion as represented by their 
papers, preachers, or local society. I found 
one man who told me that if anything went 
wrong in this huge congress of kings, — if 



American Notes 237 

there was a split or an upheaval or a smash, 
— the people in detail would be subject to 
the Idea of the sovereign people in mass. 
This is a survival from the Civil War, when, 
you remember, the people in a majority did 
with guns and swords slay and wound the 
people in detail. All the same, the notion 
seems very much like the worship by the 
savage of the unloaded rifle as it leans against 
the wall. 

But the men and women set Us an example 
in patriotism. They believe in their land and 
its future, and its honor, and its glory, and 
they are not ashamed to say so. From the 
largest to the least runs this same proud, pas- 
sionate conviction to which I take off my hat 
and for which I love them. An average Eng- 
lish householder seems to regard his country 
as an abstraction to supply him with police- 
men and fire-brigades. The cockney cad 
cannot understand what the word means. 
The bloomin' toffs he knows, and the law, 
and the soldiers that supply him with a spec- 
tacle in the Parks ; but he would laugh in 
your face at the notion of any duty being 
owed by himself to his land. Pick an Ameri- 
can of the second generation anywhere you 
please — from the cab-rank, the porter's room, 
or the plow-tail — 'specially the plow-tail, — 
and that man will make you understand in 
five minutes that he understands what manner 
of thing his Republic is. He might laugh at 



238 American Notes 

a law that didn't suit his convenience, draw 
your eye-teeth in a bargain, and applaud 
'cuteness on the outer verge of swindling ; but 
you should hear him stand up and sing : — 

" My country 'tis of thee, 
Sweet land of liberty, 
Of thee I sing ! " 

I have heard a few thousand of them engaged 
in that employment. I respect him. There is 
too much Romeo and too little balcony about 
our National Anthem. With the American 
article it is all balcony. There must be born 
a poet who shall give the English the song of 
their own, own country — which is to say, of 
about half the world. Remains then only to 
compose the greatest song of all — The Saga 
of the Anglo-Saxon all round the earth — a 
paean that shall combine the terrible slow 
swing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic 
(which, if you know not, get chanted to you) 
with Britafinia needs no Bulwarks, the skirl of 
the British Grenadiers with that perfect quick- 
step, Marching through Georgia, and at the 
end the wail of the Dead March. For We, 
even W T e who share the earth between us as 
no gods have ever shared it, we also are mor- 
tal in the matter of our single selves. Will 
any one take the contract ? 

It was with these rambling notions that I 
arrived at the infinite peace of the tiny town- 
ship of Musquash on the Monongahela River. 
The clang and tumult of Chicago belonged to 



American Notes 239 

another world. Imagine a rolling, wooded, 
English landscape, under softest of blue skies, 
dotted at three-mile intervals with fat little, 
quiet little villages, or aggressive little manu- 
facturing towns that the trees and the folds of 
the hills mercifully prevented from betraying 
their presence. The golden-rod blazed in 
the pastures against the green of the mulleins, 
and the cows picked their way home through 
the twisted paths between the blackberry 
bushes. All summer was on the orchards, 
and the apples — such apples as we dream of 
when we eat the woolly imitations of Kashmir 
— were ripe and toothsome. It was good to 
lie in a hammock with half-shut eyes, and, in 
the utter stillness, to hear the apples dropping 
from the trees, and the tinkle of the cowbells 
as the cows walked statelily down the main 
road of the village. Everybody in that rest- 
ful place seemed to have just as much as he 
wanted ; a house with all comfortable ap- 
pliances, a big or little veranda wherein to 
spend the day, a neatly shaved garden with a 
wild wealth of flowers, some cows, and an 
orchard. Everybody knew everybody else 
intimately, and what they did not know, the 
local daily paper — a daily for a village of 
twelve hundred people ! — supplied. There 
was a courthouse where justice was done, 
and a jail where some most enviable prisoners 
lived, and there were four or five churches of 
four or five denominations. Also it was im- 



240 American Notes 

possible to buy openly any liquor in that little 
paradise. But — and this is a very serious but 
— you could by procuring a medical certifi- 
cate get strong drinks from the chemist. 
That is the drawback of prohibition. It 
makes a man who wants a drink a shirker and 
a contriver, which things are not good for the 
soul of a man, and presently, 'specially if he 
be young, causes him to believe that he may 
just as well be hanged for a sheep as for a 
lamb ; and the end of that young man is not 
pretty. Nothing except a rattling fall will 
persuade an average colt that a fence is not 
meant to be jumped over ; whereas if he be 
turned out into the open he learns to carry 
himself with discretion. One heard a good 
deal of this same dread of drink in Musquash, 
and even the maidens seemed to know too 
much about its effects upon certain unregen- 
erate youths, who, if they had been once 
made thoroughly, effectually, and persistently 
drunk — with a tepid brandy and soda thrust 
before their goose-fleshed noses on the terrible 
Next Morning — would perhaps have seen the 
futility of their ways. It was a sin by village 
canons to imbibe lager, though — experto crede 
— you can. get dropsy on that stuff long be- 
fore you can get drunk. " But what man 
knows his mind ? " Besides, it was all their 
own affair. 

The little community seemed to be as self- 
contained as an Indian village. Had the rest 



American Notes 241 

of the land sunk under the sea, Musquash 
would have gone on sending its sons to school 
in order to make them " good citizens," 
which is the constant prayer of the true 
American father, settling its own road-making, 
local cesses, town-lot arbitrations, and internal 
government by ballot and vote and due re- 
spect to the voices of the headmen (which is 
the salvation of the ballot), until such time as 
all should take their places in the cemetery 
appointed for their faith. Here were Ameri- 
cans and no aliens — men ruling themselves 
by themselves and for themselves and their 
wives and their children — in peace, order, 
and decency. 

But what went straightest to this heart, 
though they did not know it, was that they were 
Methody folk for the most part — aye, Methody 
as ever trod a Yorkshire Moor, or drove on a 
Sunday to some chapel of the Faith in the 
Dales. The old Methody talk was there, with 
the discipline whereby the souls of the Just are, 
sometimes to their intense vexation, made 
perfect on this earth in order that they may 
" take out their letters and live and die in 
good standing." If you don't know the talk, 
you won't know what that means. The dis- 
cipline, or disdpYme, is no thing to be trifled 
with, and its working among a congregation 
depends entirely upon the tact, humanity, and 
sympathy of the leader who works it. He, 
knowing what youth's desires are, can turn 
16 



242 American Notes 

the soul in the direction of good, gently, in- 
stead of wrenching it savagely towards the 
right path only to see it break away quivering 
and scared. The arm of the Dis^line is 
long. A maiden told me, as a new and 
strange fact and one that would interest a 
foreigner, of a friend of hers who had once 
been admonished by some elders somewhere 
— not in Musquash — for the heinous crime of 
dancing. She, the friend, did not in the least 
like it. She would not. Can't you imagine 
the delightful results of a formal wigging ad- 
ministered by a youngish and austere elder 
who was not accustomed to make allowances 
for the natural dancing instincts of the young 
of the human animal ? The hot irons that are 
held forth to scare may also sear, as those 
who have ever lain under an unfortunate ex- 
position of the old Faith can attest. 

But it was all immensely interesting — the 
absolutely fresh, wholesome, sweet life that 
paid due reverence to the things of the next 
world, but took good care to get enough 
tennis in the cool of the evening ; that con- 
cerned itself as honestly and thoroughly with 
the daily round, the trivial task (and that same 
task is anything but trivial when you are 
" helped " by an American " help ") as with 
the salvation of the soul. I had the honor of 
meeting in the flesh, even as Miss Louisa 
Alcott drew them, Meg and Joe and Beth and 
Amy, whom you ought to know. There was 



American Notes 243 

no affectation of concealment in their lives 
who had nothing to conceal. There were 
many " little women " in that place, because, 
even as is the case in England, the boys had 
gone out to seek their fortunes. Some were 
working in the thundering, clanging cities, 
others had removed in the infinite West, 
and others had disappeared in the languid, 
lazy South ; and the maidens waited their re- 
turn, which is the custom of maidens all over 
the world. Then the boys would come back 
in the soft sunlight, attired in careful raiment, 
their tongues cleansed of evil words and dis- 
courtesy. They had just come to call — bless 
their carefully groomed heads, so they had, — 
and the maidens in white dresses glimmered 
like ghosts on the stoop and received them 
according to their merits. Mama had noth- 
ing to do with this, nor papa either, for he 
was down-town trying to drive reason into the 
head of a land surveyor ; and all along the 
shaded, lazy, intimate street you heard the 
garden-gates click and clash, as the mood of 
the man varied, and bursts of pleasant laugh- 
ter where three or four — be sure the white 
muslins were among them, — discussed a pic- 
nic past or a buggy-drive to come. Then the 
couples went their ways and talked together 
till the young men had to go at last on ac- 
count of the trains, and all trooped joyously 
down to the station and thought no harm of 
it. And, indeed, why should they ? From 



244 American Notes 

her fifteenth year the American maiden 
moves among " the boys " as a sister among 
brothers. They are her servants to take her 
out riding, — which is driving, — to give her 
flowers and candy. The last two items are 
expensive, and this is good for the young man, 
as teaching him to value friendship that costs 
a little in cash and may necessitate economy 
on the cigar side. As to the maiden, she is 
taught to respect herself, that her fate is in 
her own hands, and that she is the more 
stringently bound by the very measure of the 
liberty so freely accorded to her. Wherefore, 
in her own language, " she has a lovely time " 
with about two or three hundred boys who 
have sisters of their own, and a very accurate 
perception that if they were unworthy of their 
trust a syndicate of other boys would probably 
pass them into a world where there is neither 
marrying nor giving in marriage. And so 
time goes till the maiden knows the other side 
of the house, — knows that a man is not a 
demi-god nor a mysteriously veiled monster, 
but an average, egotistical, vain, gluttonous, 
but on the whole, companionable sort of .per- 
son, to be soothed, fed, and managed — knowl- 
edge that does not come to her sister in Eng- 
land till after a few years of matrimony. And 
then she makes her choice. The Golden 
Light touches eyes that are full of comprehen- 
sion ; but the light is golden none the less, for 
she makes just the same sweet, irrational 



American Notes 245 

choices that an English girl does. With this 
advantage : she knows a little more, has ex- 
perience in entertaining, insight into the busi- 
nesses, employ, and hobbies of men, gathered 
from countless talks with the boys, and talks 
with the other girls who find time at those 
mysterious conclaves to discuss what Tom, 
Ted, Stuke, or Jack have been doing. Thus 
it happens that she is a companion, in the 
fullest sense of the word, of the man she 
weds, zealous for the interest of the firm, to be 
consulted in time of stress and to be called 
upon for help and sympathy in time of dan- 
ger. Pleasant it is that one heart should beat 
for you ; but it is better when the head above 
that heart has been thinking hard on your be- 
half, and when the lips, that are also very 
pleasant to kiss, give wise counsel. 

When the American maiden — I speak now 
for the rank and file of that noble army — is 
once married, why, it is finished. She has 
had her lovely time. It may have been five, 
seven, or ten years ' according to circum- 
stances. She abdicates promptly with start- 
ling speed, and her place knows her no more 
except as with her husband. The Queen is 
dead, or looking after the house. This same 
household work seems to be the thing that 
ages the American woman. She is infamously 
" helped " by the Irish trollop and the negress 
alike. It is not fair upon her, because she 
has to do three parts of the housework her- 



246 American Notes 

self, and in dry, nerve-straining air the 
" chores " are a burden. Be thankful, oh my 
people, for Mauz Baksh, Kadir Baksh, and 
the ayah while they are with you. They are 
twice as handy as the unkempt slatterns of 
the furnished apartments to which you will re- 
turn, Commissioners though you be ; and five 
times as clever as the Amelia Araminta Re- 
bellia Secessia Jackson (colored) under whose 
ineptitude and insolence the young American 
housewife groans. But all this is far enough 
from peaceful, placid Musquash, and its 
boundless cordiality, its simple, genuine hos- 
pitality, and its — what's the French word that 
just covers all ? — gra — gracieuseness, isn't it ? 
Oh, be good to an American wherever you 
meet him. Put him up for the club, and he 
will hold you listening till three in the morn- 
ing ; give him the best tent, and the gram-fed 
mutton. I have incurred a debt of salt that I 
can never repay, but do you return it piece- 
meal to any of that Nation, and the account 
will be on my head till our paths in the world 
cross again. He drinks iced water just as we 
do ; but he doesn't quite like our cigars. 

And how shall I finish the tale ? Would it 
interest you to learn of the picnics in the hot, 
still woods that overhang the Monongahela, 
when those idiotic American buggies that 
can't turn round got stuck among the bram- 
bles and all but capsized ; of boating in the 
blazing sun on the river that but a little time 



American Notes 247 

before had cast at the feet of the horrified 
village the corpses of the Johnstown tragedy ? 
I saw one, only one, remnant of that terrible 
wreck. He had been a minister. House, 
church, congregation, wife, and children had 
been swept away from him in one night of 
terror. He had no employment ; he could 
have employed himself at nothing. But God 
had been very good to him. He sat in the 
sun and smiled a little weakly. It was in his 
poor blurred mind that something had hap- 
pened — he was not sure what it was, but un- 
doubtedly something had occurred. One 
could only pray that the light would never 
return. 

But there be many pictures on my mind. 
Of a huge manufacturing city of three hundred 
thousand souls lighted and warmed by natural 
gas, so that the great valley full of flaming 
furnaces sent up no smoke wreaths to the clear 
sky. Of Musquash itself lighted by the same 
mysterious agency, flares of gas eight feet long, 
roaring day and night at the corners of the 
grass-grown streets because it wasn't worth 
while to turn them out ; of fleets of coal-flats 
being hauled down the river on an intermin- 
able journey to St. Louis ; of factories nest- 
ling in woods where all the ax-handles and 
shovels in the world seemed to be manufac- 
tured daily ; and last, of that quaint forgotten 
German community, the Brotherhood of Per- 
petual Separation who founded themselves 



248 American Notes 

when the State was yet young and land cheap, 
and are now dying out because they will neither 
marry nor give in marriage and their recruits 
are very few. The advance in the value of 
land has almost smothered these poor old 
people in a golden affluence that they never 
desired. They live in a little village where the 
houses are built old Dutch fashion, with their 
front doors away from the road, and cobbled 
paths all about. The cloistered peace of Mus- 
quash is a metropolitan riot beside the hush 
of that village. And there is, too, a love-tale 
tucked away among the flowers. It has taken 
seventy years in the telling, for the brother 
and sister loved each other well, but they loved 
their duty to the brotherhood more. So they 
have lived and still do live, seeing each other 
daily, and separated for all time. Any trouble 
that might have been is altogether wiped out 
of their faces, which are as calm as those of 
very little children. To the uninitiated those 
constant ones resemble extremely old people 
in garments of absurd cut. But they love each 
other, and that seems to bring one back quite 
naturally to the girls and the boys in Mus- 
quash. The boys were nice boys — graduates 
of Yale of course ; you mustn't mention Har- 
vard here — but none the less skilled in bus- 
iness, in stocks and shares, the boring for oil, 
and the sale of everything that can be sold by 
one sinner to another. Skilled, too, in base- 
ball, big-shouldered, with straight eyes and 



American Notes 249 

square chins — but not above occasional diver- 
sion and mild orgies. They will make good 
citizens and possess the earth, and eventually- 
wed one of the nice white muslin dresses. 
There are worse things in this world than 
being " one of the boys " in Musquash. 



250 American Notes 



XVI. 

You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. 
Some of you are Commissioners, and some 
Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. 
C, and a few are privileged to walk about the 
Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy ; but /have 
seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have 
shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar — no, two 
cigars — with him, and talked with him for 
more than two hours ! Understand clearly 
that I do not despise you ; indeed, I don't. I 
am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy 
downward. To soothe your envy and to prove 
that I still regard you as my equals, I will tell 
you all about it. 

They said in Buffalo that he was in Hart- 
ford, Conn. ; and again they said " perchance 
he is gone upon a journey to Portland ; " and 
a big, fat drummer vowed that he knew the 
great man intimately, and that Mark was 
spending the summer in Europe — which in- 
formation so upset me that I embarked upon 
the wrong train, and was incontinently turned 
out by the conductor three-quarters of a mile 
from the station, amid the wilderness of rail- 
way tracks. Have you ever, encumbered with 
great-coat and valise, tried to dodge diversely- 
minded locomotives when the sun was shining 



American Notes 251 

in your eyes ? But I forgot that you have not 
seen Mark Twain, you people of no account ! 

Saved from the jaws of the cowcatcher, me 
wandering devious a stranger met. 

" Elmira is the place. Elmira in the State 
of New York — this State, not two hundred 
miles away ; " and he added, perfectly un- 
necessarily, " Slide, Kelley, slide." 

I slid on the West Shore line, I slid till 
midnight, and they dumped me down at the 
door of a frowzy hotel in Elmira. Yes, they 
knew all about " that man Clemens," but reck- 
oned he was not in town ; had gone East 
somewhere. I had better possess my soul in 
patience till the morrow, and then dig up the 
" man Clemens' " brother-in-law, who was in- 
terested in coal. 

The idea of chasing half a dozen relatives 
in addition to Mark Twain up and down a city 
of thirty thousand inhabitants kept me awake. 
Morning revealed Elmira, whose streets were 
desolated by railway tracks, and whose suburbs 
were given up to the manufacture of door- 
sashes and window-frames. It was surrounded 
by pleasant, fat, little hills, rimmed with tim- 
ber and topped with cultivation. The Che- 
mung River flowed generally up and down the 
town, and had just finished flooding a few of 
the main streets. 

The hotel-man and the telephone man 
assured me that the much-desired brother-in- 
law was out of town, and no one seemed to 



252 American Notes 

know where " the man Clemens " abode. 
Later on I discovered that he had not sum- 
mered in that place for more than nineteen 
seasons, and so was comparatively a new arri- 
val. 

A friendly policeman volunteered the news 
that he had seen Twain or " some one very 
like him " driving a buggy the day before. 
This gave me a delightful sense of nearness. 
Fancy living in a town where you could see 
the author of Tom Sawyer, or " some one very 
like him," jolting over the pavements in a 
buggy ! 

" He lives out yonder at East Hill," said* 
the policeman ; " three miles from here." 

Then the chase began — in a hired hack, up 
an awful hill, where sunflowers blossomed by 
the roadside, and crops waved, and Harper's 
Magazine cows stood in eligible and com- 
manding attitudes knee-deep in clover, all 
ready to be transferred to photogravure. The 
great man must have been prosecuted by out- 
siders aforetime, and fled up the hill for 
refuge. 

Presently the driver stopped at a miserable, 
little white wood shanty, and demanded 
" Mister Clemens." 

" I know he's a big-bug and all that," he 
explained, " but you can never tell what sort 
of notions those sort of men take into their 
heads to live in, anyways." 

There rose up a young lady who w r as sketch- 



American Notes 253 

ing thistletops and golaen rod, amid a plentiful 
supply of both, and set the pilgrims on the 
right path. 

" It's a pretty Gothic house on the left- 
hand side a little way farther on." 

" Gothic h ," said the driver. " Very 

few of the city hacks take this drive, specially 
if they know they are coming out here," and 
he glared at me savagely. 

It was a very pretty house, anything but 
Gothic, clothed with ivy, standing in a very 
big compound, and fronted by a veranda full 
of chairs and hammocks. The roof of the 
veranda was a trellis-work of creepers, and 
the sun peeping through moved on the shin- 
ing boards below. 

Decidedly this remote place was an ideal 
one for work, if a man could work among these 
soft airs and the murmur of the long-eared 
crops. 

Appeared suddenly a lady used to dealing 
with rampageous outsiders. " Mr. Clemens 
has just walked downtown. He is at his 
brother-in-law's house." 

Then he was within shouting distance, 
after all, and the chase had not been in vain. 
With speed I fled, and the driver, skidding 
the wheel and swearing audibly, arrived at 
the bottom of that hill without accidents. It 
was in the pause that followed between ring- 
ing the brother-in-law's bell and getting an 
answer that it occurred to me for the first time 



254 American Notes 

Mark Twain might possibly have other en- 
gagements than the entertainment of escaped 
lunatics from India, be they never so full of 
admiration. And in another man's house — 
anyhow, what had I come to do or say ? 
Suppose the drawing-room should be full of 
people, — suppose a baby was sick, how was I 
to explain that I only wanted to shake hands 
with him ? 

Then things happened somewhat in this 
order. A big, darkened drawing-room ; a 
huge chair ; a man with eyes, a mane of griz- 
zled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth 
as delicate as a woman's, a strong, square 
hand shaking mine, and the slowest calmest, 
levellest voice in all the world saying : — 

" Well, you think you owe me something, 
and you've come to tell me so. That's what 
I call squaring a debt handsomely." 

" Piff ! " from a cob-pipe (I always said 
that a Missouri meerschaum was the best smok- 
ing in the world), and, behold ! Mark Twain 
had curled himself up in the big armchair, 
and 1 was smoking reverently, as befits one 
in the presence of his superior. 

The thing that struck me first was that he 
was an elderly man ; yet, after a minute's 
thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, 
and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, 
I saw that the gray hair was an accident of 
the most trivial. He was quite young. I 
was shaking his hand. I was smoking his 



American Notes 255 

cigar, and I was hearing him talk — this man 
I had learned to love and admire fourteen 
thousand miles away. 

Reading his books, I had striven to get an 
idea of his personality, and all my precon- 
ceived notions were wrong and beneath the 
reality. Blessed is the man who finds no dis- 
illusion when he is brought face to face with a 
revered writer. That was a moment to be 
remembered ; the landing of a twelve-pound 
salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked 
Mark Twain, and he was treating me as 
though under certain circumstances I might 
be an equal. 

About this time I became aware that he 
was discussing the copyright question. Here, 
so far as I remember, is what he said. 
Attend to the words of the oracle through 
this unworthy medium transmitted. You will 
never be able to imagine the long, slow surge 
of the drawl, and the deadly gravity of the 
countenance, the quaint pucker of the body, 
one foot thrown over the arm of the chair, 
the yellow pipe clinched in one corner of the 
mouth, and the right hand casually caressing 
the square chin : — 

" Copyright ? Some men have morals, and 
some men have — other things. I presume a 
publisher is a man. He is not born. He is 
created — by circumstances. Some publishers 
have morals. Mine have. They pay me for 
the English productions of my books. When 



256 American Notes 

you hear men talking of Bret Harte's works 
and other works and my books being pirated, 
ask them to be sure of their facts. I think 
they'll find the books are paid for. It was 
ever thus. 

" I remember an unprincipaled and for- 
midable publisher. Perhaps he's dead now. 
He used to take my short stories — I can't 
call it steal or pirate them. It was beyond 
these things altogether. He took my stories 
one at a time and made a book of it. If I 
wrote an essay on dentistry or theology or any 
little thing of that kind — just an essay that 
long (he indicated half an inch on his finger), 
any sort of essay — that publisher would 
amend and improve my essay. 

" He would get another man to write some 
more to it or cut it about exactly as his needs 
required. Then he would publish a book 
called Dentistry by Mark Twain, that little 
essay and some other things not mine added. 
Theology would make another book, and so on. 
I do not consider that fair. It's an insult. 
But he's dead now, I think. I didn't kill him. 

" There is a great deal of nonsense talked 
about international copyright. The proper 
way to treat a copyright is to make it exactly 
like real estate in every way. 

" It will settle itself under these con- 
ditions. If Congress were to bring in a law 
that a man's life was not to extend over a 
hundred and sixty years, somebody would 



American Notes 257 

laugh. That law wouldn't concern anybody. 
The man would be out of the jurisdiction of 
the court. A term of years in copyright 
comes to exactly the same thing. No law 
can make a book live or cause it to die before 
the appointed time. 

" Tottletown, Cal., was a new town, with a 
population of three thousand — banks, fire- 
brigade, brick buildings, and all the modern 
improvements. It lived, it nourished, and it 
disappeared. To-day no man can put his 
foot on any remnant of Tottletown, Cal. It's 
dead. London continues to exist. Bill Smith, 
author of a book read for the next year or so 
is real estate in Tottletown. William Shake- 
speare, whose works are extensively read, is 
real estate in London. Let Bill Smith, equally 
with Mr. Shakespeare now deceased, have as 
complete a control over his copyright as he 
would over his real estate. Let him gamble 
it away, drink it away, or — give it to the 
church. Let his heirs and assigns treat it in 
the same manner. 

" Every now and again I go up to Washing- 
ton, sitting on a board to drive that sort of 
view into Congress. Congress takes its ar- 
guments against international copyright de- 
livered ready made, and — Congress isn't very 
strong. I put the real-estate view of the case 
before one of the Senators. 

" He said : • Suppose a man has written a 
book that will live forever ? ' 
17 



258 American Notes 

" I said : ' Neither you nor I will ever live 
to see that man, but we'll assume it. What 
then ? ' 

" He said : ' I want to protect the world 
against that man's heirs and assigns, working 
under your theory.' 

" I said : ' You think that all the world has 
no commercial sense. The book that will live 
forever can't be artificially kept up at inflated 
prices. There will always be very expensive 
editions of it and cheap ones issuing side by 
side.' 

" Take the case of Sir Walter Scott's novels," 
Mark Twain continued, turning to me. 
" When the copyright notes protected them, I 
bought editions as expensive as I could afford, 
because I liked them. At the same time the 
same firm were selling editions that a cat might 
buy. They had their real estate, and not 
being fools, recognized that one portion of the 
plot could be worked as a gold mine, another 
as a vegetable garden, and another as a marble 
quarry. Do you see ? " 

What I saw with the greatest clearness was 
Mark Twain being forced to fight for the sim- 
ple proposition that a man has as much right 
to the work of his brains (think of the heresy 
of it !) as to the labor of his hands. When the 
old lion roars, the young whelps growl. I 
growled assentingly, and the talk ran on from 
books in general to his own in particular. 

Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few 



American Notes 259 

hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded 
•whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher's 
daughter and whether we were ever going to 
hear of Tom Sawyer as a man. 

" I haven't decided," quoth Mark Twain, 
getting up, filling his pipe, and walking up 
and down the room in his slippers. " I have 
a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer 
in two ways. In one I would make him rise 
to great honor and go to Congress, and in the 
other I should hang him. Then the friends and 
enemies of the book could take their choice." 

Here I lost my reverence completely, and 
protested against any theory of the sort, be- 
cause to me at least, Tom Sawyer was real. 

" Oh, he is real," said Mark Twain. " He's 
all the boy that I have known or recollect , 
but that would be a good way of ending the 
book " ; then, turning round, " because, when 
you come to think of it, neither religion, train- 
ing, nor education avails anything against the 
force of circumstances that drive a man. 
Suppose we took the next four and twenty 
years of Tom Sawyer's life, and gave a little 
joggle to the circumstances that controlled 
him. He would, logically and according to 
the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel." 

" Do you believe that, then ? " 

" I think so. Isn't it what you call Kismet ? " 

" Yes ; but don't give him two joggles and 
show the result, because he isn't your property 
any more. He belongs to us." 



260 American Notes 

He laughed — a large, wholesome laugh — 
and this began a dissertation on the rights of 
a man to do what he liked with his own crea- 
tions, which being a matter of purely profes- 
sional interest, I will mercifully omit. 

Returning to the big chair, he, speaking of 
truth and the like in literature, said that an 
autobiography was the one work in which a 
man, against his own will and in spite of his 
utmost striving to the contrary, revealed him- 
self in his true light to the world. 

" A good deal of your life on the Mississipi 
is autobiographical, isn't it ? " I asked. 

" As near as it can be — when a man is 
writing to a book and about himself. But in 
genuine autobiography, I believe it is impos- 
sible for a man to tell the truth about himself 
or to avoid impressing the reader with the 
truth about himself. 

" I made an experiment once. I got a 
friend of mine — a man painfully given to 
speak the truth on all occasions — a man who 
wouldn't dream of telling a lie — and I made 
him write his autobiography for his own 
amusement and mine. He did it. The man- 
uscript would have made an octavo volume, 
but — good, honest man that he was — in every 
single detail of his life that I knew about he 
turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He 
could not help himself. 

" It is not in human nature to write the 
truth about itself. None the less the reader 



American Notes 261 

gets a general impression from an autobiog- 
raphy whether the man is a fraud or a good 
man. The reader can't give his reasons any 
more than a man can explain why a woman 
struck him as being lovely when he doesn't 
remember her hair, eyes, teeth, or figure. 
And the impression that the reader gets is a 
correct one." 

" Do you ever intend to write an autobiog- 
raphy ? " 

" If I do, it will be as other men have done 
— with the most earnest desire to make myself 
out to be the better man in every little business 
that has been to my discredit ; and I shall 
fail, like the others, to make my readers be- 
lieve anything except the truth." 

This naturally led to a discussion on con- 
science. Then said Mark Twain, and his 
words are mighty and to be remembered : — 

" Your conscience is a nuisance. A con- 
science is like a child. If you pet it and play 
with it and let it have everything that it wants, 
it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all your 
amusements and most of your griefs. Treat 
your conscience as you would treat anything 
else. When it is rebellious, spank it — be 
severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from 
coming to play with you at all hours, and you 
will secure a good conscience ; that is to say, 
a properly trained one. A spoiled one simply 
destroys all the pleasure in life. I think I 
have reduced mine to order. At least, I 



262 American Notes 

haven't heard from it for some time. Per- 
haps I have killed it from over-severity. It's 
wrong to kill a child, but, in spite of all I 
have said, a conscience differs from a child 
in many ways. Perhaps it's best when it's 
dead." 

Here he told me a little — such things as a 
man may tell a stranger — of his early life and 
upbringing, and in what manner he had been 
influenced for good by the example of his 
parents. He spoke always through his eyes, 
a light under the heavy eyebrows ; anon 
crossing the room with a step as light as a 
girl's, to show me some book or other ; then 
resuming his walk up and down the room, 
puffing at the cob pipe. I would have given 
much for nerve enough to demand the gift of 
that pipe — value, five cents when new. I 
understood why certain savage tribes ardently 
desired the liver of brave men slain in com- 
bat. That pipe would have given me, per- 
haps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls 
of men. But he never laid it aside within 
stealing reach. 

Once, indeed, he put his hand on my shoul- 
der. It was an investiture of the Star of 
India, blue silk, trumpets, and diamond-stud- 
ded jewel, all complete. If, hereafter, in the 
changes and chances of this mortal life, I fall 
to cureless ruin, I will tell the superintendent 
of the workhouse that Mark Twain once put 
his hand on my shoulder ; and he shall give 



American Notes 263 

me a room to myself and a double allowance 
of paupers' tobacco. 

" I never read novels myself," said he, " ex- 
cept when the popular persecution forces me 
to — when people plague me to know what I 
think of the last book that every one is read- 
Log." 

" And how did the latest persecution affect 
you ? " 

" Robert ? " said he, interrogatively. 

I nodded. 

" I read it, of course, for the workmanship. 
That made me think I had neglected novels 
too long — that there might be a good many 
books as graceful in style somewhere on the 
shelves ; so I began a course of novel read- 
ing. I have dropped it now; it did not 
amuse me. But as regards Robert, the effect 
on me was exactly as though a singer of 
street ballads were to hear excellent music 
from a church organ. I didn't stop to ask 
whether the music was legitimate or necessary. 
I listened, and I liked what I heard. I am 
speaking of the grace and beauty of the style." 

" You see," he went on, " every man has 
his private opinion about a book. But that is 
my private opinion. If I had lived in the be- 
ginning of things I should have looked around 
the township to see what popular opinion 
thought of the murder of Abel before I openly 
condemned Cain. I should have had my 
private opinion, of course, but I shouldn't 



264 American Notes 

have expressed it until I had felt the way. 
You have my private opinion about that book. 
I don't know what my public ones are ex- 
actly. They won't upset the earth." 

He recurled himself into the chair and 
talked of other things. 

" I spend nine months of the year at Hart- 
ford. I have long ago satisfied myself that 
there is no hope of doing much work during 
those nine months. People come in and call. 
They call at all hours, about everything in the 
world. One day I thought I would keep a 
list of interruptions. It began this way : — 

" A man came and would see no one but 
Mr. Clemens. He was an agent for photo- 
gravure reproductions of Salon pictures. I 
very seldom use Salon pictures in my books. 

" After that man another man, who refused 
to see any one but Mr. Clemens, came to 
make me write to Washington about some- 
thing. I saw him. I saw a third man, then a 
fourth. By this time it was noon. I had grown 
tired of keeping the list. I wished to rest. 

" But the fifth man was the only one of the 
crowd with a card of his own. He sent up 
his card. ' Ben Koontz, Hannibal, Mo.' I 
was raised in Hannibal. Ben was an old 
schoolmate of mine. Consequently I threw 
the house wide open and rushed with both 
hands out at a big, fat, heavy man, who was 
not the Ben I had ever known — nor anything 
like him. 



American Notes 265 

" ' But is it you, Ben ? ' I said. ' You've 
altered in the last thousand years.' 

" The fat man said : ' Well, I'm not Koontz 
exactly, but I met him down in Missouri, and 
he told me to be sure and call on you, and he 
gave me his card, and ' — here he acted the 
little scene for my benefit — ' if you can wait a 
minute till I can get out the circulars — I'm 
not Koontz exactly, but I'm traveling with the 
fullest line of rods you ever saw.' " 

" And what happened ? " I asked breath- 
lessly. 

" I shut the door. He was not Ben Koontz 
— exactly — not my old schoolfellow, but I had 
shaken him by both hands in love, and . . . 
I had been bearded by a lightning-rod man in 
my own house. 

" As I was saying, I do very little work in 
Hartford. I come here for three months 
every year, and I work four or five hours a 
day in a study down the garden of that little 
house on the hill. Of course, I do not object 
to two or three interruptions. When a man is 
in the full swing of his work these little things 
do not affect him. Eight or ten or twenty in- 
terruptions retard composition." 

I was burning to ask him all manner of im- 
pertinent questions, as to which of his works 
he himself preferred, and so forth ; but, stand- 
ing in awe of his eyes, I dared not. He spoke 
on, and I listened, groveling. 

It was a question of mental equipment that 



266 American Notes 

was on the carpet, and I am still wondering 
whether he meant what he said. 

" Personally, I never care for fiction or 
story-books. What I like to read about are 
facts and statistics of any kind. If they are 
only facts about the raising of radishes, they 
interest me. Just now, for instance, before 
you came in " — he pointed to an encyclopaedia 
on the shelves — " I was reading an article 
about ' Mathematics.' Perfectly pure mathe- 
matics. 

" My own knowledge of mathematics stops 
at ' twelve times twelve,' but I enjoyed that 
article immensely. I didn't understand a 
word of it ; but facts, or what a man believes 
to be facts, are always delightful. That 
mathematical fellow believed in his facts. So 
do I. Get your facts first and " — the voice dies 
away to an almost inaudible drone — "then 
you can distort 'em as much as you please." 

Bearing this precious advice in my bosom, 
I left ; the great man assuring me with gentle 
kindness that I had not interrupted him in 
the least. Once outside the door, I yearned 
to go back and ask some questions — it was 
easy enough to think of them now — but his 
time was his own, though his books belonged 
to me. 

I should have ample time to look back to 
that meeting across the graves of the days. 
But it was sad to think of the things he had 
not spoken about. 



American Notes 267 

In San Francisco the men of The Call told 
me many legends of Mark's apprenticeship in 
their paper five and twenty years ago ; how 
he was a reporter delightfully incapable of 
reporting according to the needs of the day. 
He preferred, so they said, to coil himself 
into a heap and meditate until the last minute. 
Then he would produce copy bearing no 
sort of relationship to his legitimate work — j 
copy that made the editor swear horribly, and 
the readers of The Call ask for more. 

I should like to have heard Mark's version 
of that, with some stories of his joyous and 
variegated past. He has been journeyman 
printer (in those days he wandered from the 
banks of the Missouri even to Philadelphia), 
pilot cub and full-blown pilot, soldier of the 
South (that was for three weeks only), pri- 
vate secretary to a Lieutenant-Governor of 
Nevada (that displeased him), miner, editor, 
special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands, 
and the Lord only knows what else. If so 
experienced a man could by any means be 
made drunk, it would be a glorious thing to 
fill him up with composite liquors, and, in the 
language of his own country, " let him retro- 
spect." But these eyes will never see that 
orgy fit for the gods 1 



RUDYARD KIPLING'S PORTRAIT 







INSTRUCTIONS. Send the fifteen coupons, numbered 
Volumes I to XV, to the publishers, Frank F. Lovell 
Company, 23 Duane Street, New York, and they will send 
you the above portrait, post-paid, free of all charge. 




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G\ 




LIBRARY 

DEPARTMENT OP THE INTERIOR. 



Library open from 8.45 a. in. until 4.15 p. in. 



RULES. 

I. The use 61 the Library is confined Eo the employees of the Department of the 
Interior, who must, before the first loan of a book, file with the Librarian a certifi- 
cate of identity from the Chief Clerk of the Department, or of the Bureau or Office 
in which employed. 

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not be taken from the Library. 

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of works of more than one volume when two volumes may be taken at once. 

(J. Books must not be kept longer than two weeks unless upon application to the 
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permitted. 

7. Borrowers are strictly prohibited from loaning OI transferring the books draw n 
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8. When a book has been retained beyond the period of loan its price will be 
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holding it. 

— ff. "Books returned will not Ho rei ss ue d m 
replaced upon the shelves. 

10. Writing or marking upon leaves or covers, folding or turning down h-a\ • 
other defacement or injury of books is strictly prohibited. Books must be re- 
turned in as good condition as when received. Any book injured or defaced 
\\ Idle in possession of a borrower must be replaced by a perfect copy. 

II. In selecting books from the shelves handle carefully and replace those not 
drawn upon the shelves from which they are taken. 

12. Pinal payment of salary will be withheld by the disbursing officer from em- 
ployees quitting the service until he is satisfied that all books oharged against them 
at the Library have been returned. 

13. The Librarian is authorized to suspend or refuse the issue of books to persona 
Violating any of the above rules. 

By order of the Secretarv : 

,*o™,v. r ™ « _ EDWABD M. DAWSON, 

15838b500-9-1900 Chief Clerk. 






OCT -1 W5 



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